Quick overview of my dev machine setup

Note

This is a quick overview of the tools and software I use to setup a (almost) reproducible system configuration across multiple machines and OS reinstalls (those happen more often that I care to admit). I'll do separate posts on the different tools in the future.

Emacs

My text editor, personal management system, email reader, RSS reader, and tinkering playground. It's pretty great, enough said. I host my Emacs configuration over on github. All it takes is a git clone and we're good to go.

Home manager

Based on The Nix package manager^ᛦ, Home manager is an awesome, declarative and reproducible way to manage your dotfiles and user applications. And all it takes is a home-manager switch command to get everything going. Check out my config here.

Nextcloud

I use Nextcloud for keeping all my files in sync on a personal server, hosted on Linode. I also use Nextcloud to sync contacts on my phone, have some kanban boards there as well. Nextcloud is a nice self-hosted alternative to the google suite of tools, and has many other applications and plugins as well. It's you owning your data.

Nixos config

I used NixOS for a while and crafted (sounds better than copy pasted right?) a config for it as well: My NixOS Config. NixOS is an OS based on Nix that provides a declarative configuration not only of dotfiles and user apps, but of the entire system. It's a novel way to think about an operating system, and a powerful way at that.

Conclusion

These are the main tools I use to keep my systems in sync, and it's been working quite well. There's more to be desired, but i've been able to streamline setting up a machine from zero to hero in a short time.

Details on each to come.