Chili powder
Cloves
Caraway seeds
Nutmeg

Dried soya mince

Two tablespoons of Marmite
Three tablespoons of dark soy sauce

Fry garlic and onions in olive oil.
Add red pepper and spices.

Two tablespoons of Marmite
Three tablespoons of dark soy sauce

Fry garlic and onions in olive oil.
Add red pepper and spices. Cover and braze, turn occasionally to prevent burning.
Meanwhile boil kettle and pour over soy sauce, and Marmite. Add soya mince and leave to hydrate.
Add kidney beans, olives and tomatoes; simmer to reduce until tomato juice is thick.
Add the soy mince and stir lightly so as not to spoil its texture.
Bring to back to boil and you’re done.

This was easier than I expected, but it took some reading to figure out just how little there was to do.

1. In .msmtprc turn auth on. This tries various options to find a method to authenticate, including your platform-specific keyring. On my platform this is Gnome keyring.
2. Put the account details into Gnome keyring using the msmtp-gnome-tool.py script provided as part of msmtp-gnome:

   $ python /usr/share/doc/msmtp/scripts/msmtp-gnome-tool.py  -s -u <user> -e mail.server.org

3. Tell Mutt:

   set sendmail     = /usr/bin/msmtp
   set from 	        = user@address.org
   

That’s it. Go into Mutt, compose and send.

Anyways, I spent some time looking into how to set up the necessary links from the git repo to the actual dot files (or the other way round, depending on how you think symlinks work). And got tempted by fresh. Then I found that GitHub themselves recommend it, amongst other tools, for the job. I like the idea of a bundler for shell config — I’m using vundle for Vim. But the docs for fresh don’t actually tell you how the hell it works. Here’s how it works:

1. Install fresh like they say.
2. Create a github repro for your dotfiles and clone it into ~/.dotfiles. Fresh does a lot of clever stuff with shell setup: it concatenates shell files into one place where you can source them from bash or zsh. I’m not doing that yet, so:
3. Put your config files in ./dotfiles, you don’t have to put dot in front (but I think you can if you want). Mine are in ~/.dotfiles/config
4. Use fresh edit to edit your ~/.freshrc which declares the bundles you want installed
5. Tell fresh where to find your fiels

fresh config/* --file

Run fresh install and Robert’s your father’s brother.

Oh, and one more thing: fresh edit opens your editor on ~/.freshrc so that’s also a crucial part of your setup. I put mine into .dotfiles and checked it into git. And I manually linked it back to ~/.freshrc. There might be a more elegant way to bootstrap than this  but I can’t think of it at the moment.

There are more subtle cases for scripts and bash/zsh setup, and its especially good for cherry-picking other people’s config files, if you like that sort of thing. But this is the basic setup for which I had to read the docs and the source code for fresh. Hence this post.