Github and others have recently changed the name of the default branch in git from master to main, you can read more about the change here. If you are like me you likely had a few git aliases that were hard coded to assume the default branch in a repository was master, however there is a better way of writing git aliases that will work no matter what the default is set to.

Signing your commits is a good practice that applies your John Hancock to your work so that others can verify that it was really you made the change, plus you get a cool Verified badge on GitHub and who doesn’t like badges. Managing private keys can be a tricky process but fortunately keybase greatly simplifies this and allows us to easily share keys between different machines.

Let me first introduce you to two leading characters: STDIN and STDOUT

NOTE: This method of installation is no longer supported but I will leave the post here for posterity. The issues that this was meant to solve have since been fixed by homebrew. You can visit the homebrew website for current installation instructions.

Sharing your dotfiles on the internet can have a lot of advantages but can become a huge pain if you’re not careful.