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Rationale

Goal

Provide fully automated development environment that is easy to setup and maintain.

Why Ansible?

In my experience Ansible has the easiest learning curve. It has its own caveats and gotchas, but overall it's pretty straightforward to read YAML configuration for a person that knows very little about how Ansible works. It's almost like reading plain English with very rare exceptions. Additionally, Ansible is a Swiss army knife orchestration tool. You can use it and abuse it in many different ways which might or might not be supported via other popular solution like NixOS Home Manager otherwise. One of the biggest advantages of Ansible is that (if properly described) tasks follow idempotency principle, which means playbook can be run over and over again without having to worry about your precious files accidentally being removed.

All in all - there are many automation solutions out there - I happen to enjoy using Ansible.

Why Chezmoi?

Chezmoi is another tool for managing dotfiles. It seems to be the most popular choice these days with over 6k+ stars. Prior to switch, I've used GNU Stow which had it's job done but unfortunately lacked a couple of features chezmoi tends to resolve. The most important features of chezmoi:

  • Flexible: dotfiles can be templates (using text/template syntax). While this can be achieved using Ansible builtin Jinja templates, - chezmoi provides a set of variables that can be used inside the template for simple assertions like the platform you're currently running on, architecture, hostname, environmental variables lookup and many more. Additionally, testing Jinja templates in Ansible is very cumbersome. With chezmoi this is as simple as running chezmoi execute-template < file.tmpl.
  • Portable: chezmoi's configuration uses only visible, regular files and directories and so is portable across version control systems and operating systems.
  • Transparent: chezmoi includes verbose and dry run modes so you can review exactly what changes it will make to your home directory before making them.
  • Practical: chezmoi manages hidden files (dot files), directories, private, and executable files.
  • Fast, easy to use, and familiar: chezmoi runs in fractions of a second and includes commands to make most operations trivial.

The biggest driver for choosing chezmoi was my intention to follow single responsibility principle: dotfiles should be managed separately.

Why LunarVim?

I used regular Vim for a couple of years until it has become really painful to manage a 500+ lines file. I've made an attempt to switch to Neovim after watching Vimconf hosted by ThePrimagen and TJ DeVries. This switch made me realize I don't understand half of the Lua configuration.

Luckily, it turned out that most of the keymaps, plugins and sane defaults I was trying to configure are not necessarily specific and lots of people tend to configure Neovim this way. In fact, LunarVim does this pretty well by providing a community driven framework for Neovim that acts like a wrapper with a bunch of common plugins. I happen to enjoy most of the stuff they ship out of the box. As an experienced Vim user, I found I only needed to install a couple more plugins to feel comfortable, rebind a couple of keys and configure less than 10 options.

Why Fish?

Fish ecosystem is great for interactive shells. I still write day-to-day scripts in pure bash, but the amount of features that comes preconfigured with fish is just too good to resist.

Warning

Fish is not POSIX compatible shell.