Exciting Dotfile Enhancements

Over the weekend, I’ve been cleaning up, organizing and improving my dotfiles. Below are a couple of things that I’m most excited about.

Zsh in Vim Mode

I’ve been using zsh for a while, but only recently starting using zsh in Vim mode. One thing that’s been sorely missing is moving by word in INSERT mode. I got this working by adding the following to ~/.zshrc:

bindkey '^b' backward-word
bindkey '^w' forward-word

With this config loaded, I can move forward by word boundaries with Control-w and backward with Control-b. Lot’s more configurations are listed here.

Git Advanced Aliases

I’ve been assembling Git shortcuts into a separate “functions” dotfile, but learned that it’s maybe cleaner to use Git advanced aliases. You can read more about advanced aliases here.

The advanced alias I’m most excited about is triggering a post-push hook, which is not provided in Git core. The below solution is adapted to a Git advanced alias from this Stack Overflow thread:

  # Wrapper for git push to enable a post-push hook
  push-with-hooks = !"f() { \
      local GIT_DIR_="$(git rev-parse --git-dir)" \
        && local BRANCH="$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $(git symbolic-ref HEAD))" \
        && local POST_PUSH="$GIT_DIR_/hooks/post-push" \
        && git push "$@" \
        && test $? -eq 0 && test -x "$POST_PUSH" \
        && exec "$POST_PUSH" "$BRANCH"; \
    }; f"

With the above in place, put the following in an executable file at .git/hooks/post-push:

#!/bin/sh

echo "$@"

This doesn’t do much as-is outside of echoing the current branch to STDOUT, but could be used to trigger a build, or all kinds of fun things!