dotfiles

My personal MacOS setup. One repo, one area to centralize my personal opinions, and one sick setup. Enjoy.

Inspired by Meta Principle Engineer Kun Chen's own personal dotfile repo.

What You Get

Me setup consists of the following:

• System settings (dark mode, key repeat, dock, Finder, trackpad)
• Homebrew apps (casks and CLI tools, make sure to check if you are okay with downloading these)
• Nix user packages (ripgrep, fd, fzf, jq, lazygit, Hack Nerd Font)
• Shell (oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k prompt, aliases)
• Editor (Neovim + VSCode config)
• Neovim is the default editor (yes, I am superior to you if you do not use neovim)
• Dock layout (managed manually via bin/set-dock.sh)
• Desktop wallpapers per monitor (managed manually via bin/set-wallpapers.sh)
• Agent configs (global AGENTS.md)
• Reef (window manager, auto-installed from GitHub release)

Prerequisites

• Apple Silicon Mac, by default.
• Intel Mac: change one line. In configuration.nix, set nixpkgs.hostPlatform = "x86_64-darwin"; (the comment right there tells you the same thing).

Fresh-machine setup

On a brand new Mac, from a bare clone of this repo:

git clone https://github.com/emoral435/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles

Before you run it: review "Make it yours" below. Change the host label or CPU architecture if needed, and read the Homebrew cleanup warning. bootstrap.sh applies the config to your machine, so do this first.

./bootstrap.sh

bootstrap.sh does four things, in order:

1. Installs Determinate Nix, if it isn't already installed.
2. Symlinks this repo to ~/.dotfiles. This has to happen before the first build, because home.nix points at config files through ~/.dotfiles.
3. Checks the user configured in flake.nix against your actual macOS username, and offers to fix it for you if they differ.
4. Runs the first darwin-rebuild switch. It fetches the darwin-rebuild tool from the nix-darwin 26.05 release branch, then applies this repo's locked flake config.

After that, darwin-rebuild exists and you're on the normal workflow below.

Extra Steps To Take For My Specific Configurations/Apps Upon First Start

1. Rectangle will need to be authorized under MAcOS's settings, under: Privacy & Security > Accessibility.
2. Reef will need to have its profiles configured.

Validate without applying

Once Nix is installed (bootstrap.sh step 1 handles that), you can check that the config builds without touching your system - handy when you have edited something:

nix flake check --no-build
nix build .#darwinConfigurations.mac.system --dry-run

If you renamed the host label in "Make it yours", substitute your label for mac in these commands.

Daily use

Edit the config files in place, then apply:

./rebuild.sh

That's it. No separate build-and-copy step.

Dock layout is not automated on every rebuild - pinning apps to the dock is a one-off per machine. When you add or remove a cask that should live on the dock, run:

./bin/set-dock.sh

This clears the dock and pins the apps listed in the script. Currently that is: Ghostty, Spotify, Visual Studio Code, Notion, and Todoist.

Desktop wallpapers are set once per machine. Drop your images into home/.config/wallpapers/ as display-1.jpg, display-2.jpg, and display-3.jpg (one per monitor), then run:

./bin/set-wallpapers.sh

The script asks whether you want the same wallpaper on all displays (uses display-1.jpg) or a different one per monitor. If any file is empty or missing, it prints a warning and skips that display.

Make it yours

This repo is mine. If you clone it, review these before you run bootstrap.sh:

• Username: run ./bootstrap.sh (it detects your macOS username and offers to set it) OR change the single user = "emoral435" line in flake.nix. You can find this out by running whoami, and copy it using whoami | pbcopy. Everything else (configuration.nix, home.nix, home directory paths) is threaded from that one variable.
• Host label "mac", in three places: flake.nix (the darwinConfigurations."mac" name), rebuild.sh:5 (the #mac at the end of the flake reference), and bootstrap.sh's first-switch command (also #mac). All three have to match.
• CPU architecture, hostPlatform in configuration.nix (see Prerequisites above).

Git identity: this config deliberately does not set your git name or email. Git will stop your first commit and tell you to set them (git config --global user.name "Your Name" and git config --global user.email you@example.com). If you'd rather manage that declaratively, add this back to home.nix with your own identity:

programs.git = {
  enable = true;
  settings.user = {
    name = "Your Name";
    email = "you@example.com";
  };
};

Homebrew cleanup warning: configuration.nix sets homebrew.onActivation.cleanup = "zap". That means every time you switch, Homebrew removes any package or cask on your machine that isn't listed in the brews and casks arrays in configuration.nix. If you already have Homebrew stuff installed that isn't in that list, the first switch will uninstall it. Read through brews and casks before you run bootstrap.sh or rebuild.sh for the first time, and add anything you want to keep.

Heads-up:

• home/AGENTS.md is my personal agent policy. If you clone this repo, you'd silently inherit my agent instructions - edit or delete home/AGENTS.md if you don't want that.

Repo tour

• flake.nix - the entry point. Wires up nixpkgs, nix-darwin, home-manager, and nix-homebrew, and declares the mac machine.
• configuration.nix - system-level config: macOS defaults, Homebrew, Reef auto-install and login item setup.
• home.nix - user-level config: shell, packages, prompt, and the symlinks described below.
• rebuild.sh - re-applies the config after the first switch. Run this every time you make a change.
• bin/set-dock.sh - one-off script to pin Homebrew casks to the macOS dock. Run it when you add or remove a dockable app from brews/casks.
• bin/set-wallpapers.sh - one-off script to set wallpapers per display. Run it after dropping your images into home/.config/wallpapers/.
• home/ - the actual config files that get symlinked into place (Ghostty config, Neovim config, VSCode settings, zsh/powerlevel10k, wallpapers, global AGENTS.md).

How the symlinks work

The files under home/ are the real files - editing them here is editing your live config, no rebuild needed to see the change in your editor. home.nix uses mkOutOfStoreSymlink to point the following paths straight at files in this repo, so the two never drift out of sync:

Target (on disk)	Repo source
~/Library/Application Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config	home/.config/ghostty/config
~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json	home/.config/Code/User/settings.json
~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/keybindings.json	home/.config/Code/User/keybindings.json
~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/snippets	home/.config/Code/User/snippets
~/.zshrc	home/.config/zsh/.zshrc
~/.p10k.zsh	home/.config/zsh/.p10k.zsh
~/.config/nvim	home/.config/nvim

You only run ./rebuild.sh when you change something that isn't just a symlinked file, like a package list or a system default.

If you add a new config file to home/, wire it up in home.nix using the same mkOutOfStoreSymlink pattern.