dotfiles - Lucas F. Costa

My macOS terminal setup, kept deliberately small.

Philosophy

These dotfiles started where most dotfiles start: a junk drawer of every plugin, alias, and theme I'd ever read a blog post about.

The repo has gotten smaller every year since. What's left is what survived contact with daily use, the rest got cut.

As a general piece of advice for those building on top of these dotfiles: if a tool needs three pages of config before it earns its keep, you should probably reach for a different tool. If an alias you added six months ago hasn't burned itself into muscle memory, it should go.

Dotfiles aren't a software collection. They should include only the handful of things you do every day, made frictionless and then gotten out of the way.

What's included

• zsh — .zshrc, aliases, a hand-rolled prompt, and a light/dark theme switcher (hackermode.zsh)
• nvim — .config/nvim/, fully Lua-based with lazy.nvim
• tmux — .config/tmux/tmux.conf with matching light/dark theme files
• alacritty — .config/alacritty/alacritty.toml with light/dark color presets
• git — .gitconfig
• claude code — .claude/ (settings, statusline, CLAUDE.md)
• macOS defaults — .macos (Finder, Dock, keyboard, etc.)
• programs.sh — installs Homebrew, the apps above, Fira Code Nerd Font, Node via nvm, and Claude Code
• install.sh — rsyncs everything into your home directory

Quickstart

$ git clone https://github.com/lucasfcosta/dotfiles && cd dotfiles
$ ./programs.sh   # installs Homebrew, terminal apps, fonts, Node, Claude Code
$ ./install.sh    # copies dotfiles into your home directory
$ ./.macos        # (optional) apply my macOS system defaults

Then restart your terminal.

Things you still have to do manually

Install tmux plugins

After install.sh copies .tmux.conf, open tmux and press prefix (ctrl + a) + I to fetch plugins.

Pick a Nerd Font in Alacritty

programs.sh installs Fira Code Nerd Font, but if you swap fonts, update .config/alacritty/alacritty.toml with the new family name.

Related Content

• In Praise of Plain Text
• How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal (outdated)
• Vim Tips (outdated)
• My first blog post about vim (outdated)