Customize¶

A handful of environment variables and overlay paths cover the most common customizations without forking changes upstream.

`REPOS_DIR`¶

start-tmux-session (and attach-tmux-session) discover Git repositories by walking a directory tree. .zshenv exports REPOS_DIR="${HOME}/Repos" as the default; override it by editing .config/zsh/.zshenv (or layering it in via your own private overlay) to point elsewhere:

export REPOS_DIR="$HOME/code"

Prefer .zshenv for exported customizations

Environment variables (anything you'd export) belong in .zshenv so they're visible to every Zsh invocation — scripts, non-interactive shells, and editor subprocesses — not just interactive sessions. Reserve .zshrc for things that only matter when a human is typing (aliases, key bindings, prompt init, plugin loaders).

Private Git overlay¶

The shipped ~/.config/git/config ends with:

[include]
    path = ~/.config/private/git/config

Put your user.name, user.email, and any company-specific Git config in ~/.config/private/git/config. Common pattern: keep this file in a separate, private repository that uses stow to symlink into ~/.config/private.

No credentials in private repos

Even private repositories are not a credential store. Use the system keychain (git-credential-manager) or a hardware token. The private overlay is for personal information (email, work URLs), not secrets.

Theme variants¶

The cyberdream palette has both dark and light variants; the system theme drives Ghostty's choice automatically:

.config/ghostty/config

theme = dark:cyberdream,light:cyberdream-light

Other tools follow whichever variant they were configured for in this repo. See Theme → per-tool for the matrix.

Disabling tools you don't use¶

The Brewfile and nvim plugins are a take-it-or-leave-it bundle, but the easy escape hatches are:

Brewfile: edit your profile under .config/homebrew/Brewfile.<profile> (e.g. Brewfile.personal) and re-run make packages. The required baseline in setup/darwin/Brewfile.requirements is reapplied every run, so removing a required package from the profile won't drop it — edit the requirements file instead if you really mean to remove something everyone gets.
NeoVim extras: edit .config/nvim/lua/config/lazy.lua and remove extras.lang.* imports for languages you don't touch — startup time drops noticeably.
Tmux plugins: edit .config/tmux/conf/plugins.conf.

NeoVim dashboard header¶

The Snacks dashboard header in .config/nvim/lua/plugins/header.lua is a plain heredoc string — swap it for any ASCII art you like. The shipped art was generated with figlet (available via brew install figlet):

figlet -f graffiti -w 80 "Deavon's Terminal" | awk '{printf "%-80s\n", $0}'

-w 80 sets the output width so the rendered art wraps to two lines instead of one very long one. The awk pipe right-pads every line to exactly 80 characters — Snacks centres each line independently, so unequal line lengths will visibly stagger the art. Pick a font with figlet -f <font> -w 80 "preview" after browsing ls $(brew --prefix)/share/figlet/fonts, or use showfigfonts to list every installed font with a sample. Paste the output between the [[ and ]] delimiters in header.lua — keep the surrounding indentation so Lua's long-string literal stays valid, and the dashboard picks it up on the next NeoVim launch.

Profile shell startup¶

Suspect Zsh is slow? Use the included profiler:

profile-shell

This wraps time -p zsh -i -c exit with ZSHPROFILE=1, which causes .zshrc to load zsh/zprof and dump a timing table on exit. See scripts/misc.