Configuration sharing with Dropbox, Part 0: Introduction
If you’re anything like me, you have more than one pc that you regularly use. One at home, one at work, maybe more. If you’re even more like me, there is software that you use on each of these pc’s. VIM, Eclipse, maybe more. And, exactly like me, you’ve configured these programs heavily to suit your every fancy. And you want to share these configurations across all your pc’s, with a minimum of hassle. And, of course, if you re-install your pc, you want to restore your configurations with no effort.
What are you, a programmer or something?
Of course you don’t want to e-mail files to yourself or push and pull stuff on GitHub. I mean, that works, but it’s too easy to forget, and you’reI’m too lazy to bother anyway. Changes should propagate automatically!
This is Part 0 in a series of posts that will help you do just that, using Dropbox. In each of the next installments, I will highlight one specific program and explain how to share its configuration in such a way that you can easily tweak your configuration and have it pushed to each of your workstations automatically.
This series of posts is based on a StackOverflow answer I once gave. I’ve expanded a bit on it since then, and I’m documenting that expansion here.
Set-up
This post explains the preliminaries of my system. Before you move on to one of the later parts in this series, you’ll need to follow these steps:
- Download and install Dropbox on each of your workstations.
- Create a folder called
configinside your~/Dropbox[1] folder.
That’s it.
Further reading
Now, you can open any of the following posts to find out how to set it up for your favourite software[2]:
- Part 1: VIM
- Part 2: Eclipse
- Part 3: Bash
- Part 4..n: other cool software (hoped for)
Enjoy!
Footnotes
[1] Note that in this post, and all subsequent ones, I’ll be assuming Unix file conventions, unless noted otherwise. So if you’re on Windows, replace all /’s with \’s, and replace ~/Dropbox with C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\My Documents\My Dropbox.
[2] Well, actually it’s my favourite software. But maybe yours is in this list, too!