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Shell & terminal

Everything on this page ships with the core component of every scaffold — you get it regardless of which addons and agents you pick. It is all themed cyberdream end to end: Ghostty, the prompt, ls colours, and every addon share one palette.

zsh

dotty relocates zsh under XDG: a one-line ~/.zshenv sets ZDOTDIR=$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh, and everything else lives in .config/zsh/. The env file defines the XDG base dirs, pins Homebrew's global Brewfile to $XDG_DATA_HOME/homebrew/Brewfile (with HOMEBREW_REQUIRE_TAP_TRUST=1), moves Go's caches under XDG, wires SSH_ASKPASS to the dotty askpass applet (see Signing keys), and sources the active profile's env.zsh — which is how per-profile values like $DOTTY_WORKTREES and agent home relocations reach the shell.

Plugins load through zinit:

  • zsh-syntax-highlighting and zsh-autosuggestions
  • fzf-tab — tab completion becomes an fzf picker, with directory previews for cd and zoxide jumps
  • Oh My Zsh sudo (double-press Esc to prefix sudo) and command-not-found snippets

Integrations initialised at startup: oh-my-posh (prompt, prompt.yaml), fzf keybindings, zoxide as cd, direnv, and mise (each guarded, so machines without a tool skip it). History keeps 5000 deduplicated, shared-across-sessions entries; vivid generates LS_COLORS from the cyberdream theme.

Aliases:

Alias Expands to
ls, ll, la, lla, lt lsd variants (list, long, all, long+all, tree)
sts dotty tmux new — start/attach a repo session
lts tmux list-session
kts tmux kill-server
vim, vi nvim (when installed)
y yazi file manager that cds to where you quit

Ghostty

.config/ghostty/config sets the cyberdream theme in both variants (theme = dark:cyberdream,light:cyberdream-light follows the system appearance), Iosevka NF at 15pt with font thickening, a hidden titlebar, background opacity 0.95 with blur, Option-as-Alt, and a Display P3 colourspace. It also maps the private-use codepoints U+F4000–U+F47FF to the lobe-icons glyph font — the AI-brand glyphs that dotty init installs and that name the agent windows in tmux. Matching terminfo entries for xterm-ghostty are linked into ~/.terminfo.

Git

.config/git/config is the shared baseline; identity and signing arrive via includes so the repo itself never contains PII:

  • Behaviour: pull.ff only + pull.rebase true, autoStash/autoSquash rebases, init.defaultBranch main, git-lfs wired, a commit template dir whose prepare-commit-msg hook appends a Signed-off-by trailer.
  • Stacked-branch workflow: aliases onto dotty git — git start, git append, git propose, git sync (fetch trunk, prune merged layers, refresh PR maps, rebase+resign when diverged), git stack to pick a layer (stack status is dotty git status directly — git cannot alias over the status builtin), git up / git down for navigation, git resign, and git browse (opens the upstream forge, falling back to origin) — signature-preserving, trunk-based stacks with ff-merge (see Signature-preserving stacks).
  • Conditional includes by host: GitHub remotes get gh as the credential helper; Codeberg/Forgejo remotes get Git Credential Manager with OAuth client IDs.
  • Identity include: ~/.config/private/git/config — your name/email, written once by dotty init, kept outside the repo (see Where things live).
  • Per-profile signing include: ~/.config/dotty/active-profile/git.gitconfig — SSH signing via dotty signing-key on machines whose profile uses security keys; silently skipped elsewhere.
  • Worktrees include (loaded last, so it wins): disables commit/tag signing inside agent worktrees — see Agent worktrees & re-signing.
  • Global ignore: commit.sh, local Claude settings and plans, .DS_Store, .env.* (with .env.dotty kept), and the worktrees directory.

SSH

With security keys enabled, ~/.ssh/config contains a Match host * exec "dotty signing-key link" rule — every connection first refreshes the stable ~/.ssh/id_sk_current symlink to the active profile's allowed key — plus IdentitiesOnly yes and IdentityAgent none (no ssh-agent; the key never leaves the YubiKey, and PIN prompts go through pinentry-mac).

Themed addons

Each optional addon renders a small, cyberdream-skinned config:

  • btop — resource monitor
  • k9s — Kubernetes TUI (skin + aliases)
  • lazygit — git TUI (also included by the nvim addon)
  • lsd — the ls replacement behind the aliases above
  • yazi — terminal file manager (theme + bat syntax theme)
  • vivid — the LS_COLORS generator theme