After having spent quite some time in finding the right set up for my developing environment, it came natural to look for a way for porting my configuration. Enter a dotfiles repo, aka having all my configurations only one git clone away and making my life so much easier.

Michael Smalley wrote an amazing tutorial for managing dotfiles and creating a script for automagically installing them (go and check it out!), which provided me with a great starting point. However, his script handles only dotfiles housed in the home directory and that didn't really get together with my goal of adding Sublime Text settings to my dotfiles repo. So I fired up Nano and extended the script in order to make it do exactly what I needed.

First of all, I needed to to move Sublime configuration files to my dotfiles folder. Thankfully Mark Nichols' post tipped me that I the only folder I needed to care about was the User one. So, after cleaning it up from some experiments leftovers, I moved to my dotfiles folder and placed a symlink in its previous location.

Then I added a variable holding the path to the User directory:

sublimedir=~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User

and at the end of the file the lines taking care of the magic:

# move any existing dotfiles in homedir to dotfiles_old directory, then create symlinks
for file in $files; do
    if [ -a ~/.$file ]; then    # check if a dotfile already exists
        echo "Moving any existing dotfiles from ~ to $olddir"
        mv ~/.$file $olddir
    fi
    echo "Creating symlink to $file in home directory."
    ln -s $dir/$file ~/.$file
done

echo "...done"

# Create symlink for Sublime Text User directory
if [ -d $sublimedir ]; then # check whether the directory already exists

    if [ -L $sublimedir ]; then
        echo "Removing old symlink"
        rm $sublimedir
        echo "...done"
    else
        echo "Moving the existing Sublime Text Users directory from $sublimedir to $olddir"
        mv $sublimedir $olddir
        echo "...done"
    fi
fi
echo "Creating symlink to User in $sublimedir"
ln -s $dir/sublime/User $sublimedir
echo "...done"

The full script can be found on github.

Finally, since Package Control updates regularly some of the files in the User folder, I added them to a .gitignore file in order to avoid to much noise in my version control. A list of those files can be found in the docs of Package Control.