CLAUDE.md

Dotfiles

Working approach

• Make changes incrementally — one function or one logical change at a time
• Discuss proposed changes and get agreement before editing files
• Small diffs are easier to review; avoid batching unrelated changes

Git workflow

• Always use the commit-commands:commit skill for all git commits

Zsh conventions

• Prefer [[ ]] over [ ] for conditionals
• Use arrays instead of strings when building commands — avoids eval
• Use print instead of echo -e for escape sequences
• Use local to scope variables inside functions

Testing for command presence

• Use (( $+commands[cmd] )) to test if an external executable exists in PATH
  • $commands is an associative array mapping command names to their paths
  • Documented in zshmodules(1) under the zsh/parameter module
  • Fast (hash table lookup), no subprocess, no output to suppress
• Use whence cmd &>/dev/null when you need to detect aliases, functions, or builtins — not just PATH executables

Testing Zsh changes

• Run reload! to pick up changes in the current session
• For completion changes, rebuild the cache first: rm -f ~/.zcompdump && exec zsh