~/dotfiles

My personal dotfiles collection for macOS (Apple Silicon). I've had Claude make an effort to summarize what's going on in here, but YMMV.

At the moment I'm playing around with a terminal theme engine heavily stolen inspired by the radix-ui team.

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Note

I previously had this doing a sparse checkout on the nerd-fonts repo so I could quickly patch together a custom DankMono Nerd Font with some additional custom glyphs, but that project is huge and it's something I do maybe once every couple of years, so I've currently got it commented out. (BTW — if you're not using DankMono you really should be.)

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Important

Theming is still a hacked-together PoC. Currently it's darkmode only, and you can either have it build you a random radix-ui/colors inspired palette, or you can give it an accent color (it assumes accent_9) and it will generate the palette + grey scales for you. It generates a zsh theme + nvim theme + ghostty app icon that includes whatever nerdy mark you've currently got set in the zshenv file.

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Tip

There's a bug with trying to display kitty / iTerm graphics inside tmux when you use iTerm.app. I'm honestly still not entirely sure what the true root cause is, but if you're trying to get your setup working you might find scripts/show_tmux_iterm_img.sh useful.

Requirements

• macOS (Apple Silicon)
• git (available by default via Xcode Command Line Tools)
• zsh
• ghostty or iterm terminal
• a "nerdy" font that has the powerline + nerd glyphs
• be some kind of awful masochist? I dunno.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/nicholaswagner/dotfiles
cd dotfiles && ./setup.sh

setup.sh should be idempotent — symlinks use ln -sf, submodule init is guarded. Safe to re-run.

What it sets up

Tool	Description
Oh My Zsh	Zsh framework with plugins and themes
Homebrew	Package manager — installs everything in Brewfile
Ghostty	GPU-accelerated terminal with true color and image support
Neovim	Editor with lazy.nvim plugin management and generated colorscheme
tmux	Terminal multiplexer with themed two-line status bar
nvm	Node Version Manager + latest Node
bun	JavaScript runtime
LM Studio	Local LLM inference via OpenAI-compatible API
fzf	Fuzzy finder with themed colors and image previews
chafa	Terminal image rendering (used by motd.sh and fzf-preview.sh)

Shell config

All shell files live in config/zsh/ and are symlinked to ~ by setup.sh.

File	Loaded by	Purpose
config/zsh/zshenv	All shells	$DOTFILES, sources active theme from terminal-colors repo, fzf theme, terminal-icon config, API keys from Keychain, zsh-ai provider, bun/nvm paths
config/zsh/zprofile	Login shells	Homebrew init, Obsidian PATH
config/zsh/zshrc	Interactive shells	Oh My Zsh (plugins: git tmux zsh-ai nvm bun direnv), aliases.zsh, functions.zsh, _cmd_rule preexec hook, motd
config/zsh/aliases.zsh	Via zshrc	LM Studio shortcuts (general + coder), cc=claude, vim=nvim, git-log, brewfile, navigation, readme=glow, source-maps, ghhtml
config/zsh/functions.zsh	Via zshrc	Xcode helpers, lms_load, ffmpeg color remap, get-page-markdown, ANSI audit, terminal color utilities, do-it-live, cc-storytime, ghostty-html

scripts/

Helpers live under scripts/. They are not on $PATH — invoke by explicit path.

Script	Language	Description
build-theme.py	Python	Generates .env from Radix scales. Supports --accent, --stdout
build-ghostty-theme.py	Python	Writes Ghostty palette to config/ghostty/active-theme
gen-vim-theme.py	Python	Writes radix.vim (VimScript) + active-theme.lua (Lua) from THEME_* vars
gen-terminal-icon.py	Python (uv)	Generates Ghostty.icns with gradient, gloss, and text sheen
darkcolors.py	Python	Radix dark scale data (imported by build-theme.py)
lightcolors.py	Python	Radix light scale data (not currently wired)
motd.sh	Zsh	Message-of-the-day: composites a chafa avatar at terminal startup
fzf-preview.sh	Bash	Image/code previews in fzf using chafa (symbols) + bat
build-clip-url.sh	Bash	Compiles src/ClipURL.swift into a macOS app for the clip:// URL scheme
show_tmux_iterm_img.sh	Bash	Workaround for rendering chafa images inside tmux via iTerm2 passthrough
bashenv.sh	Bash	Comment-aware .env loader; optionally execs a command in that env
term-img.sh	Bash	Terminal image helper
utils.sh	Bash	Shared shell utilities
dev.py	Python	Dev helper

tmux

Two-line status bar (status 2): line 1 is the header, line 2 is a thin colored separator.

• Left: terminal icon + username
• Right: git branch badge (error/success colored) + time
• Window tabs: current pane path or running command, accent-colored for active window

The tmux server inherits THEME_* from the launching shell. Theme-dependent options are baked in via inline run blocks at config load. Vim-style pane nav (C-h/j/k/l), prefix + r to reload, prefix + k for fzf file popup.

Neovim

Config at config/nvim/init.lua. Uses lazy.nvim for plugin management. Active colorscheme is active-theme (generated Lua file).

Plugins: nvim-tree, which-key, tokyonight (fallback), toggleterm, image.nvim (kitty protocol), telescope (+fzf-native), themery (live theme picker), render-markdown.

Zsh prompt

config/oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/active.zsh-theme — powerline-style prompt using THEME_* stepped vars. Shows current directory (accent background), git branch (error/success colored), and exit code on failure.

Ghostty config location

Ghostty on macOS reads from ~/Library/Application Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config in preference to ~/.config/ghostty/config, so setup.sh symlinks the Application Support path to config/ghostty/ghostty.conf. The theme = active-theme directive in that config resolves to ~/.config/ghostty/themes/active-theme, which is symlinked to config/ghostty/active-theme.

Submodules

• submodules/source-maps-downloader — sourcemap-grabbing utility; exposed via the source-maps alias
• submodules/ghostty-themes — Ghostty theme previewer; symlinked to ~/.local/bin/ghostty-themes by setup.sh

Secrets

API keys are stored in macOS Keychain and retrieved in zshenv via security find-generic-password. Never committed.

# Store a key:
security add-generic-password -a "$USER" -s "LM_STUDIO_API_KEY" -w "your-key" -T /usr/bin/security

# Currently retrieved: LM_STUDIO_API_KEY, HUGGING_FACE_TOKEN

LM Studio

Three profiles per model configured in config/lm_models_config.json:

Profile	Context
fast	8K
balanced	32K
quality	65K

Models: general (google/gemma-4-26b-a4b) and coder (qwen/qwen3-coder-30b). Exposed via OpenAI-compatible API at http://localhost:1234/v1. Also powers zsh-ai for in-terminal AI command suggestions.