// the find
holman/dotfiles
@holman does dotfiles
Zach Holman's personal dotfiles, structured around a topic-centric convention where each technology gets its own directory and files follow predictable naming patterns (.zsh, .symlink, path.zsh, etc.) to get auto-loaded or bootstrapped. It's primarily a reference and fork-starting-point for macOS/zsh users, not a general-purpose dotfiles manager. Stars here reflect the blog post that popularized the topic-based pattern, not the files themselves.
The topic-directory convention is genuinely good design — keeping git aliases in git/, ruby tooling in ruby/, etc. beats a flat pile of alias files. The bootstrap script handles symlinking automatically based on naming convention, so there's no manifest to maintain. The bin/ git helpers (git-nuke, git-unpushed, git-undo, git-wtf) are small scripts worth lifting individually. Active as of June 2026, so it's not a dead reference.
This is one person's personal config, Mac-only, zsh-only — if you're on Linux or using bash/fish, this is dead weight. The README explicitly warns it may break if you don't have his dependencies installed (rbenv, Homebrew, etc.), which means forking it means auditing everything before you run bootstrap. No test harness, no CI, no idempotency guarantees — running script/bootstrap twice on a partial install is a gamble. Ruby and Vim tooling is baked in at the top level, so you're forking someone's tech stack, not just their shell config pattern.