this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Yeah, I've been using scripts to set only the parts I actually want to modify, which is already a pretty good step for reducing the amount of information and knowing what you publish without having to review the dotfiles when you back up your latest configuration changes.
But even with that, there's some info I do not particularly want public.
Like, it starts with the name of my user account showing up in places. On my personal device, I just call it "main" to sidestep this whole problem, but if I want to use those scripts on my work laptop, well, the user name there is a shorthand of my real name, which I do not want to publish.
But there's also lots of things in between.
Like, I make music as a hobby, which isn't really something I care to announce to the world, but decided I don't mind the world knowing either.
On the other hand, I decided against sticking my RSS feeds into there for now, because I want to be able to add any RSS feed without having to think about whether I want that particular interest public.
Do you mean the username of your home directory? Because you can also use "$HOME" in scripts to refer to it without having to give the specific file path
Ah yeah, that didn't make a ton of sense. To some degree, I wanted to say that it may show up in various config files, which you're right, I could template with a shell script.
But then I'm using Nix for scripting, which has a concept that everything should be defined in the repo, so you shouldn't have dependencies on external state like
$HOMEor$USER.I'm still working out to what degree that's actually necessary/useful (and I do have a workaround, so I don't need to check in my username). But I'm guessing, it comes partially from the 'proper' thing being NixOS, where you define the whole OS in your configuration, so you would need to type out at some point anyways, what the user should be called, so that it can create it.