In my last post I talked about how I have been using Ansible for my new laptop configuration, and shared my configuration for notion.

So far, I've been extremely happy with using Ansible for configuring my machine. Prior to using Ansible, I'd spend a fair amount of time creating detailed notes that described what I did. I estimate that creating Ansible recipes takes about the same time as keeping good notes, and maybe even less. That's because there are many existing roles for common settings and software that can be reused. As with any ecosystem, the quality of such roles varies.

The big difference between my notes and Ansible, though, is that Ansible playbooks can be played in minutes, whilst manually following my notes can take hours to set up an entire new machine. I used to dread the idea of configuring a new machine. But now it's fairly effortless.

I just publicly shared my Ansible configuration. I don't expect that anyone will use my configuration as is, any more than I expect anyone to use my notion configuration! I'm extremely opinionated and picky. But I do hope that it might give people some ideas, like how to install llvm, nvidia drivers and so on. I know I personally found other people's repositories to be helpful.

In a very similar vein, I've started using dorothy, which claims to allow you to "... bring your dotfile commands and configuration to any shell." Since I usually but not always use fish, I've always been hesistant to write my own commands in fish. Plus, I have been writing bash scripts for long enough that I'm decent at it, so it tends to be one of my go-tos. Dorothy makes it easy to define variables and commands in such a way that they magically appear in all shells. (Again, this is very useful for fish, which is not a posix-compliant shell.) There's also a fair number of useful built-in commands. Dorothy encourages users to split their dotfiles into public and private portions, and you can view my public dotfile here. Specifically, here are my custom commands. Some of these might be useful, such as setup-util-ghidra and setup-util-ghidrathon. I've found that having a designated spot for these types of utility commands encourages me to write them, which ultimately saves me time. Usually.