Now my personal computer does have much nicer color schemes and a few plugins for code dev that I don’t carry around. But even then I try to use the defaults in my IDEs and browsers, because at this point I’m on work computer number.. 11? Configuring it is starting to get old
That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Since all my dotfiles are in Github, configuring new system is just a git clone and copying a few files around. I don't even use any config manager, since I rarely get new computers. Takes a few minutes max per machine (plus maybe package installs like zsh if it's not there already).
Assuming you have internet and can access GitHub. Setting up internally accessible repos for that or bake it into an image is its own excercise, which you'd have to setup again for every site and isn't there on day 0.
Even so, "a few minutes per machine" builds up quickly if that happens multiple times per day and new airgapped sites are a regular occurence. That's not including the possibly larger cost of context-switching to "customization mode" for every setup.
I do have a few dotfile customizations I carry around for sites/boxes I bother enough with but at this point they're cut down and familiar enough that it takes me a few seconds to put those in place manually from memory and dist defaults.
Minimal .profile:
VISUAL=vim EDITOR=vim
tmux and some other apps will pick up on this and switch to vi-style keybindings.
I resonate with embracing the Zen of leaning into defaults.
It's like when I tried to get used to a DVORAK keyboard when I'd spend my weekdays in a school computer lab...
But supposedly you already have an automation that you maintain your standard servers with. Adding an Ansible role that puts .vimrc into $HOME surely isn't that much of a maintenance burden?
Nobody should be ABLE to log in to servers by default, that's the way they become unicorns and not cattle.
Yeaah, that don't fly unless you're in a really seat-of-your-pants environment. =)
# Roaming bashrc profile
function sshrc() {
BASHRC=$(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc_roaming | base64 -w 0)
ssh -t $@ "echo \"${BASHRC}\" | base64 --decode > ~/.bashrc_roaming; \
bash --rcfile ~/.bashrc_roaming; \
rm ~/.bashrc_roaming";
}If the claim these folks make is "time spent struggling through a default config on an unfamiliar machine" > "time saved by crafting an workshop to fit your mind", then we are not the same.
(Probably, the dividing line here is time spent coding vs time spent managing infra.)
Like sure, if you need to quibble about red or yellow prompts, eh. But if there is a good log colorizer or analyzer that makes an expert better at handling the system, or some aliases that make a system easier to manage - I want this deployed for _all_ admins on _all_ relevant systems.
And sure, all code running on a server is a security topic. But then let's figure out a way to run your favorite tools through the software security pipeline and then deploy it to systems. Sure, I dislike installing the latest js-based npm fad on a database for a minor advantage, but if there is some well-aged tool from the postgres space... I'd probably rather work to have it.
> I want this deployed for _all_ admins on _all_ relevant systems.
You're never going to find a config that everybody is happy with. If that were the case, then there would be no need of config at all.
If your biggest problem running a system is the line-next semantic, you're in a much better place than I am. No one on the team has ever raised that.
That's my style
Howdy-do me?
Watch me smile
But fare-the-well me
After a while
'Cause I gotta roam
And any place I hang my hat is home"
To me it feels like getting told to not put nice shelves in my home because other buildings don't have them.