Atuin and chezmoi are the dog's bollocks

My dotfiles repo is the oldest one I still have. Its first commit is from 2012. The message I wrote for that commit tells a familiar story.

Fresh start for config files
The old config repo had become bloated and unwieldy

I don't remember what went wrong, but evidently, things had had gotten out of control. Synchronising development tools across multiple computers has always been such a pain in the ass. Not any more though. 12 years later, I finally have a setup in place that I'm happy with.

Atuin

Losing shell history when swapping back and forth between different terminal tabs or different computers has always been frustrating. It's an annoyance I'd accepted as inevitable. For no particular reason, I recently became inspired to question that inevitability, and found Atuin soon after.

No idea how I lived without this tool before. In particular, as someone who uses ffmpeg frequently, it's been amazing to be able to refer back to any given set of filters I've ever used.

The end-to-end encrypted sync feature is a game changer as well. Having access to your full shell history on every computer you use feels like it changes what the terminal is somehow. Brings it a bit closer to being an extension of you or something, I don't know.

The stats are cool too. For example, atuin stats -c 3 prints your top three most-used commands.

My top command there – git s – is my alias for git status. Learning that I'm running that so often made me realise that those fancy terminal prompts that include git status info are worth the trouble. I'd stopped bothering with them because of the dotfiles syncing problem, and this inspired me to check in and see if it was solved yet. It was!

chezmoi

There are a lot of dotfiles tools. Most of them are effectively proof-of-concept in terms of the maturity level of the implementation. Someone has a core idea they're excited about, they implement that, then the project quietly goes into maintenance mode. What makes chezmoi the best isn't any particular concept – it's the work that's gone into polishing the annoying details around the edges.

In my case, I just wanted to use it to set up oh-my-zsh automatically and keep the config in sync between different computers. There's an example in the chezmoi docs showing how to do exactly this thing.

[".oh-my-zsh"]
    type = "archive"
    url = "https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/archive/master.tar.gz"
    exact = true
    stripComponents = 1
    refreshPeriod = "168h"

I was blown away by how easy it was to set that up. Syncing a few little personal config files has always been the easy part, and it's generally these externally-sourced configs where things become difficult. You always get it syncing eventually, but it breaks along the way and so the end result feels brittle. Somehow chezmoi has cracked it. For once this feels like it will work on the first try when I next have to set up a new computer.

Things are good

I'm in a really good place at the moment when it comes to tools. Shipping 666a with SQLite as its production database was a huge personal revelation, going all-in on VSCode terminal has decluttered my workflow, and doing a bunch of React Native at work is scratching a really longstanding itch. I'm getting tons done and feeling happy in the process.

Interestingly, the creator of Atuin has quit her day job to found a company and work on Atuin full time. Will be fun to see what happens next there.