Here's a repo of all of my favorite environment configurations, including setups for zsh, xterm, tmux, vim, i3, etc. If you're in it for a quick install and you trust me, you can just run:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicholastmosher/dotfiles/master/install.sh)"

Let's start with the management technique. The root of this repository represents the status of your homedir after installing. This is done by placing the git repo into a side folder (~/.dot) so that subdirectories of your homedir (and thus, other git repositories) aren't shadowed by the dotfiles repo. If you'd like to read more about this technique, the original idea came from this hacker news article which was later referenced in this atlassian blog post.

This means that you can manage any file or directory in your homedir, provided that you use the alias dot instead of git while referencing the dotfiles repo. For example, if you add some aliases to .alias and want to commit them, you would use

dot add .alias
dot commit -m "message"

Most of my vim installation process came from Harlan's setup. It's got a script to download and install vundle, and a bundles file (.vimrc_bundles) that lists the git repositories of plugins to install. Run .vim/setup.sh, and everything will handle itself. If you want to just install the vim setup without the other dotfiles setup, you should be able to just run

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicholastmosher/dotfiles/master/.vim/setup.sh)"
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicholastmosher/dotfiles/master/.vimrc > $HOME/.vimrc

Most of my tmux setup involves integrating with vim for inter-pane navigation using C-(h j k l). Apart from that, the only other changes are the powerline theme and navigating to next/prev windows using C-\ and C-] respectively.