I use irssi on a cloud server for my IRC needs. Along with it I’ve written some utility scripts - the most useful is kibo to find all messages sent to myself by searching the irssi logs. Since my home dir is a bit longer lived my scripts keep getting little tweaks and improvements. One I’ve been doing lately is completions. I had hoped yesterday to show a more complicated zsh completion example but so far haven’t gotten it to work.

A weird side-effect of putting my home dir in vcsh is that I can write tickets for it. So mild annoyances that can’t be fixed right get a ticket. That way if I have time later I’ll have a better sense of the issue. You can set up “a git server” with just an ssh account on a server that has git on it. Nowadays though most people run something like Gitlab or Gogs or one of the hosted services like Gitlab, Github or Bitbucket.

I’ve written a few articles on using vcsh for tracking your home dir. Unlike previous options vcsh lets me use multiple repositories. My first experiment with this was a past repository. Lots of Unix tools use the GNU readline library so there are a number of history files to collect. I already was collecting all of them in ~/.history.d. In addition due to problems with NFS mounted home dirs I’d long ago put the hostname in the names of history files as a way to prevent file corruption.

One nice side effect of using vcsh was developing more complex scripts to help me do things. I didn’t have to worry a script or tool would get lost when a machine inevitibly died. However before writing a script, sometimes it’s not a bad idea to check and see if someone else already has. Lately many of those that I’ve found have been in Go. Originally I did these with update but it made update take a long time to run and sometimes with die if a rarely used Go util was broken.

A while back I switched to vcsh. I’ve written a few articles on using it but since then I’ve migrated machines a number of times. The big issue I’ve found is having to manually install software on each machine. There are things my scripts depend on and things I just expect to have and manually creating them each time is annoying. So the solution obviously is a script. It’s actually used all the time as I might create new dependencies or find new tools I need so I’d want that installed on all machines.

tl;dr my year in vim Gource is a neat tool for visualising the history of a of a software project. In a way it’s kind of a fun combination of this scene Jurassic Park and version control. Reading up on it I learned it could also visualise multiple repositories so I decided it would be kind of fun to do just that. I use vcsh to manage my home directory, pass to manage passwords, Hugo for my website and slack for managing my personal servers.

Since switching to vcsh I’ve been writing more personal scripts since they’re pretty easy to ship around to each machine. Plus more things have REST APIs and python’s slumber makes it dead easy to talk to them. However I then have to make sure modules like slumber are installed since it’s not in the python standard library. This adds a level of awkwardness to the scripts in my ~/bin. While looking for something else I came across this answer on stackoverflow and it fit what I wanted to do.

I’m doing a bit more open source development and some projects insist on updating code bases on mailing lists with patches. And they generally react badly to html email. Using mutt works best with them. And that’s fine, it’s not too hard to get mutt working with gmail. And you can use pass to pull in the password in your .muttrc like so: password=`pass gmail/acct/mutt` So no need to keep a password resting in cleartext in your homedir.

I’ve been using vcsh for a few months now and am very happy with it. Currently I’m using two repos - a home repo which is really just a continuation of my old mercurial (previously subversion) home dir; and a past repo which is where all my history files are stored. One issue I had was that while vcsh st worked fine, vcsh home st really didn’t - showing me all the files that weren’t tracked by git.