I’ve been doing alot of machine setup recently, both VM’s and a new Mac. This has lead me to think about dotfiles once again, and also to consider using VIM much more. One other thing I’ve been thinking about doing for a while is using ZSH.

Github has a number of dotfile projects which should make doing this stuff a little bit easier. The idea being that you can clone a repository run a command or two and end up with a kick-ass ninja environment that will instantly make you more productive.

Of course the reality is somewhat different. For starters:

• which dotfile project do you choose
• how do you test out this environment
• how do you roll-back to your productive environment, when blingo-environment-0.2.7 kills you.

My answer to this - and its not pretty - is to use separate accounts to test the environments. However I still have to be able to migrate the environment I like to my main account when I’m finished, so its just not as simple as that.