Den's Dotfiles

Single-command, idempotent workstation setup for MacOS, CachyOS and Ubuntu. install.sh detects the profile, CPU and micro-arch level, then brings the machine to a known state. It adds and updates, never deletes and never duplicates -- re-running is always safe.

Quick start

From a completely bare system (only curl required -- git, shell and everything else get installed for you):

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denpatin/dotfiles/HEAD/install.sh)"

It installs git, clones this repo to ~/dotfiles, and hands off to the real installer.

If the repo is already cloned:

~/dotfiles/install.sh

Both paths do exactly the same thing and converge on the same state.

Flags:

--kind gui|cli|wsl  gui = standalone with desktop apps
                    cli = standalone, no desktop apps, still tunes kernel/drivers/power
                    wsl = no desktop apps, no kernel or hardware tuning
--shell fish|zsh    pick shell non-interactively (default fish)
--yes, -y           accept defaults, no prompts
--upgrade           re-run installers for already-installed non-repo tools
--status            print installed vs missing, then exit

--kind is the first question and has no default -- a wrong silent guess would install desktop apps on a headless box. It is auto-set to wsl under WSL and to gui on macOS, and is required alongside --yes on a standalone Linux box.

Order is fixed: distro -> system kind -> shell (installed and made default first) -> package manager -> toolchain -> kernel/tuning -> mise -> symlinks -> tools -> programs.

Two independent axes

Distro (auto-detected) decides how hard things get optimized:

Distro	Policy
macos	Homebrew + mise; Brewfile rules; never touched
cachyos	x86-64-v3 repos, native rebuilds, native Ruby
ubuntu	stock kernel, apt + mise, no optimization

System kind (first question; WSL is auto-detected) decides GUI and hardware:

Kind	Desktop apps	Kernel / drivers / power	/ram + RAM-Postgres
gui	yes	yes	yes (CachyOS)
cli	no	yes	yes (CachyOS)
wsl	no	no	no

So a headless CachyOS box still gets every CPU optimization, and CachyOS under WSL still gets v3 repos and native builds -- just no kernel, drivers or power tuning. Ubuntu stays boring either way so Vivado never breaks; WSL2's kernel belongs to Windows (wsl --update), not to the distro.

My machines

• MacBook Pro 16" (2026): Apple M5 Max, 18 cores (6 S + 12 P), 40-core GPU, 128GB unified memory, 2TB SSD
• ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 (2023): i7-1370P vPro 28W, 14 cores (6 P + 8 E), 20 threads, 64GB LPDDR5X-7500, 2TB NVMe

Shells

Chosen once at start, installed and made the login shell before anything else. config.fish is the source of truth; .zshrc is a strict mirror -- identical aliases and functions, one for one.

Every command-replacing alias is guarded by an existence check, so a half-installed system never loses cat, ls, find or grep.

Command	Tool
cat	bat
cd	zoxide
df	duf
du	dust
find	fd
grep	ugrep -G
jq	jaq
ls	eza
node	bun
ps	procs
top	syswatch

ripgrep stays separate for ad-hoc search.

Updating

upd is the daily path on every OS. On Linux it prints what changed, from which version to which, and asks before applying -- the native tools already behave like brew when you don't silence them with -y:

• cachyos -- paru -Syu (repos + AUR in one shot), then mise outdated + mise upgrade, then uv tool upgrade --all
• ubuntu/wsl -- apt update + apt list --upgradable + apt upgrade, then the same mise/uv steps
• macos -- unchanged brew pipeline

Re-running install.sh converges to the same state but is not the update path.

CPU optimization (CachyOS only)

Micro-arch level is read from the dynamic loader, never hardcoded. The i7-1370P reports x86-64-v3 (Raptor Lake fuses off AVX-512, so v4 cannot appear). If it ever reports less than v3, the installer aborts rather than silently using a slower repo.

Kernel: linux-cachyos-bore-lto, prebuilt for x86-64-v3. BORE + Clang ThinLTO + -O3 + 1000 Hz + PREEMPT_FULL. Nothing is compiled: the repo build already has everything, and a local kernel build would buy ~0-2% (the kernel barely uses AVX2) while costing half an hour per point release.

BORE over EEVDF: stock linux-cachyos defaults to EEVDF. BORE boosts tasks that sleep and wake often, which is exactly "editor and terminal stay responsive while make -j20 saturates all 20 threads". The -lto variant means BORE no longer costs the ThinLTO build, so there is no tradeoff left to make.

Where each tool comes from:

• x86-64-v3 repos -- bat, fd, ripgrep, zoxide, yazi, zellij, just, hurl, xh, neovim, git-delta, dust, duf, fzf, hyperfine, jaq, jq, jless, jujutsu, sccache, ccache, sd, tmux, typst, uv, watchexec, broot, atac, ugrep, ghostty, git, cmake, mold, gcc, llvm, clang, postgresql
• Compiled natively via cargo (target-cpu=native from cargo/config.toml) -- eza, procs, md-tui, syswatch
• Natively rebuilt from source (paru -G + tuned makepkg) -- starship and fish, the only hot daily-drivers with no v3 build. Optional menu item.
• Ruby is compiled from source with -march=native (compile = true in mise/cachyos.toml) -- every rspec run goes through the interpreter, so this is not a micro-optimization
• Left generic on purpose -- bun (rebuilding it is a Zig + JavaScriptCore build measured in hours, and it is not CPU-bound)
• Not available on Linux at all -- clean; fd <regex> -X rm does the same thing

/etc/makepkg.conf.d/99-native.conf (a drop-in, so cachyos-settings cannot overwrite it) gives every AUR and rebuilt package -march=native -O3, LTO, ccache, target-cpu=native and GOAMD64=v3 for free.

Thermals (CachyOS + Ubuntu, same ThinkPad)

intel-undervolt with power package 30/8 22/10 -- PL2 30W/8s, PL1 22W/10s.

A 22W sustained cap settles the X1C around 65-75 C, so the chip never reaches its thermal ceiling and never drops clocks, while the 30W/8s window covers exactly the short compile and test spikes. thermald and power-profiles-daemon handle the rest; ananicy-cpp + cachyos-ananicy-rules is what keeps VSCode responsive while -j20 runs.

RAM workflow (CachyOS)

32GB tmpfs at /ram. TMPDIR=/ram/tmp, so every compiler temp file, rspec fixture and node/esbuild scratch already lands in RAM.

Three commands, project-independent, no sudo, run from anywhere inside a project:

ram      # copy this project into /ram, symlink the original path at it
unram    # sync it back to disk, restore the real directory
rams     # what is in RAM right now, with sizes

ram copies (never moves): the on-disk <project>.disk stays as backing, so a reboot loses only work since the last sync -- never the repo, never .git. It refuses to run if /ram is unmounted or too small, and rolls back cleanly on any rsync failure.

Because the original path becomes a symlink, everything -- foreman, rspec, bun, cargo, zig, VSCode -- keeps using the same path and transparently works in RAM. Restart long-running processes after ram: anything started earlier still holds the old directory's inode.

PostgreSQL in RAM (CachyOS)

The whole cluster lives in /ram/pgdata on port 5433 and is rebuilt empty on every boot by pg-ram-init.service. Development and test data are both disposable by design.

fsync=off, full_page_writes=off, synchronous_commit=off, wal_level=minimal, jit=off, max_connections=200 (enough for parallel_rspec -n 12 plus foreman). Most of the rspec speedup comes from durability being off, not from tmpfs itself.

Superusers postgres and denpatin, trust auth on localhost -- so psql -U postgres -h localhost -p 5433 and DataGrip both connect with no password. tmpfs is invisible from the outside: it is an ordinary TCP server on localhost:5433.

After a reboot the cluster is empty, so reload it the usual way:

just slup     # staging dump -> drecreate + drestore into localhost:5433
just ssp      # parallel test DBs + full suite

Languages

All managed by mise, identical on every machine:

• Bun, Node (LTS)
• Crystal, Go, Ruby, Rust, Zig (+ zls)
• Python via uv
• C/C++ via system clang/gcc (+ mold linker, ccache)

Gems: foreman, rubocop, solargraph.

Tools by domain

• Search / nav -- ripgrep, ugrep, fd, fzf, zoxide, broot, yazi
• Inspect / diff -- bat, eza, git-delta, jless, jaq, yq, qsv, choose, grex
• Build / run -- just, watchexec, hyperfine, sccache, ccache, mold, cmake, mise
• System -- dust, duf, procs, bandwhich, syswatch, czkawka
• VCS / multiplex -- git, jujutsu, zellij, tmux
• API -- xh, hurl, atac, ngrok
• Python -- uv, ty, jupyterlab
• Ruby -- rubyfmt, rbspy, foreman
• Typesetting -- typst, TeX Live
• Metrics -- scc, tokei

Repo structure

• install.sh -- cross-OS installer (bootstrap + 4 profiles)
• Brewfile -- MacOS formulae, casks, VSCode extensions
• config.fish -- fish config (source of truth)
• .zshrc / .zshenv -- zsh config (strict mirror of fish)
• mise/config.toml -- runtimes + CLI shared by all OSes
• mise/linux.toml -- extra CLI for Ubuntu/WSL
• mise/cachyos.toml -- CachyOS overlay: disables mise tools covered by v3 repos, compiles Ruby natively
• cargo/config.toml -- target-cpu=native + mold linker
• linux/ -- makepkg drop-in, zram, /ram tmpfs, RAM-Postgres units, TrackPoint rule
• nvim/, ghostty/, zellij/, starship.toml, vscode/, ssh/, .gitconfig