I was kind of surprised to see this article on HackerNews, so I thought I’d ask here; how do you handle your dotfiles and do you share them publicly?
My own dotfiles started from those provided by ArcoLinux, with a bunch of changes over the years I had them. Currently installed using Ansible, because that’s more sensible than Bash for this imo.
Yeah, I’ve been using scripts to set only the parts I actually want to modify, which is already a pretty good step for reducing the amount of information and knowing what you publish without having to review the dotfiles when you back up your latest configuration changes.
But even with that, there’s some info I do not particularly want public.
Like, it starts with the name of my user account showing up in places. On my personal device, I just call it “main” to sidestep this whole problem, but if I want to use those scripts on my work laptop, well, the user name there is a shorthand of my real name, which I do not want to publish.
But there’s also lots of things in between.
Like, I make music as a hobby, which isn’t really something I care to announce to the world, but decided I don’t mind the world knowing either.
On the other hand, I decided against sticking my RSS feeds into there for now, because I want to be able to add any RSS feed without having to think about whether I want that particular interest public.