Dotfiles

Ben's dotfiles

My dotfiles. They've gone through many ups and downs over the years, but at the
moment they're:

- text and terminal centric (hx, zellij, yazi)
- cross-platform (macOS and linux)
- designed to work just as well over ssh as run locally

Where I've taken anything from the web I've tried to give credit appropriate to
the licence. If I've missed giving you a shout out, then let me know and I'll
gladly add one in.

Quick start

Bootstrap a new machine with:

This installs Homebrew and mise, clones the repo, creates symlinks, and installs
mise-managed tools.

Installation (manual)

If you prefer to set things up manually:

Verification

Check that everything is set up correctly:

Platform support

Works on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux. The setup is zsh-only and mise-first
for tool management, using Homebrew on macOS and native package managers on
Linux.

AI coding agents

This repo provides shared configuration for multiple AI coding agents, with
CLAUDE.md as the common project-level instructions file.

How each agent uses these files

- Claude Code: claude/CLAUDE.md is symlinked to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md.
- Codex CLI: the same global instructions are symlinked to
  ~/.codex/AGENTS.md, and portable notification hooks are symlinked to
  ~/.codex/hooks.json. Model selection, project-instruction fallbacks,
  trusted-project paths and UI state remain machine-local in
  ~/.codex/config.toml; the oy alias only selects full-access mode.
- Gemini CLI: gemini/settings.json tells Gemini to read CLAUDE.md and
  GEMINI.md as context files.

The create_symlinks.sh script sets up all necessary symlinks and directories.

Personal skills plugin (ben)

My personal Claude Code skills library (mail, vault, benswift-writer, phdconvenor, etc.)
lives in a separate private…