Tools on Tom Meurs

Dotfile Management with mise and chezmoi: The Perfect Combo

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:23:00 +0100

TL;DR Six ways of syncing dotfiles later, the one I kept is chezmoi for the files and mise for the tool versions, with the mise config living inside the chezmoi repo. Templates handle the work laptop against the personal desktop, age handles the secrets, and a fresh machine is one command and about five minutes. The walk-through goes from one managed file to the bootstrap I run for real.

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same for my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a setup that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The catch is that I run more than one machine. A laptop, a desktop, now and then a throwaway VM for testing. For years, keeping those in sync was a pile of hacks I didn’t trust.

YubiKey + Pass + GPG + SSH: One Key to Rule Them All

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:00:00 +0100

TL;DR One YubiKey carries a GPG key with a signing, an encryption and an authentication subkey. gpg-agent hands the authentication subkey to SSH, git signs with the signing subkey and pass decrypts with the encryption subkey, so one PIN in the morning and a touch per action replace every password I used to type. The SSH part alone is three steps and worth doing on its own.

Every morning I plug in my YubiKey, type one PIN, and that’s the last secret I type until I pull it out again. SSH to a server, no password. Sign a commit, no passphrase. Pull a secret out of pass, touch the key. One thing in a USB port, and the rest of the day my authentication happens without me.

Taskwarrior, Timewarrior and Vit: The Ultimate CLI Productivity Stack

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0100

TL;DR Taskwarrior, timewarrior and vit are my task list, my time tracking and the vim-style screen on top, all in the terminal and all plain text in ~/.task. Two commands get you started. The rest of this post is what I bolted on afterwards, from projects and dependencies to a self-hosted sync server, and you can stop at any section.

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain.