Hobby Code

Why I moved my dotfiles to chezmoi

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:02:00 -0700

I have been hand-rolling a dotfiles repo since roughly 2014. The recipe was always the same: a folder full of .zshrc and .gitconfig and friends, plus an install.sh that ran a few dozen ln -sf lines. It worked. It also broke in slightly different ways every time I set up a new machine.

A few months ago I gave chezmoi a real try and now I do not understand why I waited so long. What it gets right:

A Go CLI starter template I keep reusing

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:15:00 -0800

Every few months I find myself reaching for the same handful of patterns when I start a new Go CLI. This time I finally wrote them down in a tiny template I can clone and fill in. Nothing here is novel, but having it sitting in one place saves me 30 minutes of plumbing each time.

The layout I converged on:

.
├── cmd/<binary>/main.go // entry point, only flag parsing and wiring
├── internal/app/ // the actual logic
├── internal/cli/ // flag definitions, help text
├── internal/version/ // baked-in build info
├── Makefile
└── go.mod

The pieces I always end up needing:

Switching from Vim to Helix after twelve years

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:44:00 -0800

I have been using Vim since 2013. Last month I gave Helix a real try, the kind where you delete the symlink to nvim and force yourself to use the new thing for two weeks. I do not think I am going back.

The selling point for me is not the modal model or the speed. It is the fact that Helix ships with a working LSP and tree-sitter setup out of the box and I never had to think about it. My Neovim config was 800 lines of Lua and broke approximately every other month when a plugin author rewrote their API. The Helix config that does roughly the same thing is 40 lines of TOML and has not broken once.

A tiny zsh function I use daily

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:08:00 -0800

This is silly but it has paid for itself many times over. I added it to my .zshrc years ago and I now reach for it five or six times a day without thinking.

mkcd() {
 mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"
}

That is the whole thing. mkcd some/nested/path creates the directory and steps into it in one motion. I know mkdir -p && cd is two words longer, but those two words turn out to be the difference between flow and friction.

Notes on rsync incremental backups

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:31:00 -0700

I have been using a small rsync script to back up my laptop to an old USB drive every Sunday evening for the past three years. It is nothing fancy, but I keep tweaking it and I figured I should write down what it actually does before I forget.

The core idea is --link-dest: each weekly snapshot only stores files that changed since the previous one, and everything else is a hardlink to the prior snapshot. On disk it looks like a full copy of every backup, but the space cost is roughly one full copy plus the deltas.