The thing that really made dotfiles click for me was the switch to zsh in macOS + Armin Briegel's (of Scripting OS X) book, which laid out exactly how the transition was going to work. I'd done some basic things in `.bash_profile`, but this took it to another level entirely.

Tl;dr `zsh-newuser-install` is pretty idiot-proof, but it helps to know what the options are if you've never seen them before.