Dotfiles

My personal dotfiles for macOS, managed with Ansible.

Quick start

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/michaelbarton/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles

# Apply configuration with Ansible
cd ~/.dotfiles
make apply

Run specific Ansible tags

uv run ansible-playbook -i ~/.dotfiles/ansible/inventory.ini ~/.dotfiles/ansible/dotfiles.yml --tags "hooks,setup"

Tagged never tasks (run explicitly when needed):

# Install Homebrew packages from Brewfile, prune orphans, clean caches
make packages

# Optional bioinformatics tools
make packages-bio

# macOS defaults and Dock (requires sudo)
uv run ansible-playbook -i ~/.dotfiles/ansible/inventory.ini ~/.dotfiles/ansible/dotfiles.yml --tags macos --ask-become-pass

Since macOS 13.2, defaults write against a sandboxed app silently writes to the wrong plist unless the terminal has Full Disk Access — the command succeeds and does nothing.

Maintenance

make fmt_check
make nvim-check
make nvim-update   # sync plugins and refresh lazy-lock.json

Fish Shell

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgebucaran/fisher/main/functions/fisher.fish | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher
fish -c "fisher update"

Customization

For machine-specific settings, create:

• ~/.local/environment.bash for Bash settings
• ~/.local/environment.fish for Fish settings