Part 1 of 3: The Dorothy Configuration Series

This is the first installment in a three-part series exploring how I use Dorothy to manage my shell configuration across multiple shells and operating systems. In this series, I’ll walk through my journey from dotfile chaos to a portable, maintainable system.

Series Overview:

• Part 1: Taming the Dotfile Chaos with Dorothy - Introduction and core concepts (this post)
• Part 2: Secrets Management with 1Password - Safe environment variable handling
• Part 3: AI-Powered Shell Commands with Shell-GPT - Natural language shell integration

This post was written with AI assistance (Claude) for structure, formatting, and information gathering. The ideas, direction, and voice are my own.

Let me start this with a confession:

I really wanted to like AppImages

The promise is compelling: universal Linux binaries that run everywhere without installation. Just download, chmod +x, and go. It’s the kind of elegant simplicity that makes you think “why didn’t we do this sooner?”

Then reality hits.

The Cursor Catalyst

This whole adventure started when I decided to try Cursor, the AI-powered code editor that’s my daily code editor. Unfortunately, it’s not updated frequently in AUR, so I decided to try the AppImage. When I tried to run it, I got the following error: