This is my HOME. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My technique for managing this stuff is based on rtomayko's, which is
outlined at https://github.com/rtomayko/dotfiles. Basically, my
HOME is itself a git work tree, with repo data in ~/.git. To
prevent git status from being overwhelmingly noisy, I put * in
~/.gitignore. This is the only difference between my approach and
rtomayko's; with my approach, .gitignore is itself versioned,
whereas his approach relies on the (unversioned) .git/info/exclude
file.
Similarly, a number of my larger files (.zshrc, .emacs) source
other stuff that is not tracked, which is where I can put
site-specific or sensitive things that I do not want to be tracked in
git.
To set up a home directory, run:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stpierre/dotfiles/master/bin/setup-home.sh | bash -ex
The .zshrc in particular is fairly complex, and I'm pretty proud
of it, so it deserves special mention. My .zshrc just loads, in
alphabetical order, every file in ~/.zsh.d/S*. (Basically, it
imitates init scripts.) Several of the files in there load their own
.local files, and S98_local also loads
~/.zsh.d/zshrc.$(hostname), ~/.zsh.d/zshrc.$(hostname -s), and
both of those with any trailing digits stripped off. This makes it
trivial to customize my zsh environment for different sites or hosts
while still retaining the same core of zsh settings.