I liked Zach Holman's post on dotfiles as well as his topical project structure, so I forked it...even though it doesn't include a ton of his customizations.

• git clone git://github.com/griswold/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles
• cd ~/.dotfiles
• rake full_install

The full_install rake task will fetch any submodule dependencies, compile any plugins with native extensions (as in command-t), and symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory.

Once you have done a full_install, you can just run install in the future if you need to re-symlink the files for any reason.

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get symlinked without extension into $HOME when you run rake install.

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• bin/: Anything in bin/ will get added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• topic/*.sh: Any files ending in .sh get loaded into your environment.
• topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in *.symlink get symlinked into your $HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you run rake install.
• topic/*.completion.sh: Any files ending in completion.sh get loaded last so that they get loaded after we set up zsh autocomplete functions.