Hello, i would like to know how you manage your dotfiles.
Do you use some gui or tui?
There are many ways i don’t what to do.
Probably im going to do git repo with lazygit. I like tuis. I am managing files on two artix linux systems 1- pc and 2- laptop
I use home-manager to manage most of my dotfiles and store them in a git repository. Additionally, I just symlink the configurations I’m too lazy to write as home-manager options (yet), which in turn is a decent way to make migrating to home-manager options less upfront.
How many dot files are you changing to need some sort of manager?
For me it’s more about keeping multiple systems in sync and working as intended. E.g. I have my laptop, a home server with couple different distros and a few cloud VMs. Whenever I change a keybind in neovim or tmux or whatever, I just save the changes in a slightly different way and now every machine has those changes so I don’t need to update each machine manually.
ln exists.
I use a bare git repo. After the initial set-up its just the basic git commands but invoked with a
gitdfalias. I wrote a (non-monetized) blog post here about it.If still needing a tui you could write a simple helper script to call the commands.
I do a git repo for my dot files with an installer that configures it based on whether I’m using Linux, macOS, or FreeBSD; a server or desktop; and whether I’m in bash or zsh. It also includes a bunch of functions and aliases that I find useful. It’s not always pretty because I also use it as a practical place to try new shell script bits when I have time. I’m hoping to change some things around soon thanks to some ideas from Dave Eddy’s bash course at ysap.sh.
i used to do this, but couldn’t figure out how to stay on top of the changes introduced by distro’s and updates to the apps; did you figure these out somehow?
I pretty much stick to straight bash and core utils, so it’s not much of a burden. Plus on the Linux side, I mostly stay with Debian and its derivatives, which limits some of the work.
But really I don’t consider every feature of my dot files to be a finished product. The core stuff is reliable, but if I catch a problem with anything more esoteric or if I see some functionality that looks interesting, it’s a brain teaser I get to tackle.
Nix (home-manager) 😬
I use YADM which is a thin wrapper around a bare git repo but still has some creature comforts like per-machine configs and templating.
Since you still need to interact with Git, I pair it with Lazygit. Love that software, I do everything Git with it now!
Unfortunately it is a little jank due to the way Lazygit handles bare repos, thankfully there’s a command that sets up the needed Git variables for it to work correctly:yadm enter lazygitI send the repo to my own Forgejo instance. Kinda overkill but I was already self-hosting other services so I thought “Fully private Git server just for me? Why not?”
Now, this is only for managing user level files. For managing system level configs I haven’t setup anything yet.
YADM has a solution for this but it seems a little jank, maybe I’ll learn Ansible instead, dunno.Chezmoi
It’s the only one that just works and has enough features for me, but not too many.
I just wrote a bash script copies the relevant files or directories I want to back up from either ~ or ~/.config and places them in a local git directory which I then push to a private repo on Codeberg. Super janky and manual but I update dotfiles so seldom that it works for what I need.
GNU Stow, backed up to a git repo.
For those who might not see the purpose, it’s for keeping your profiles on different machines in sync, especially if you use the terminal a lot.
Same here.
Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into
${HOME}/projects/handy-sciptsand then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a
git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git pushso that all your devices are synced up.I’m using VCSH, which allows me to split the home directory into multiple git repos without worrying about symlink consistency (like with GNU stow) or apps that have problems with symlinks.
The syntax is exactly the same as git, only that I do (for example)
vcsh emacs add -pinstead ofgit add -p.Nix, but I’d only recommend it if you share my same brand of mental illness
I also share this brand of illness.
As I was reluctant going all in, having kept them in git since 2012, I still keep a few of them in their own separate repository. I load them as a nix flake input, and put the files in the expected place using nixos. Works OK, but adds a bit of a roundtrip if you are experimenting with changes often.
This also allows me to share some of them to my work machine, which uses nix, and other files on other systems that dont.
That said, I consider myself all in nix quite some time ago, and have moved more and more of the config over to the nix repo using the nix language for config instead of the input flake config file approach. Iterating on it is much faster this way.
This is the way.
I never did until I started using hyprland.
Now I have those in a git repo: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/hypr-dotfiles
Nothing at all. If things go south on the install I’ll have a clean slate. Really the only thing I have backed up are keys, everything else is nonessential.
I created a file tree that looks similar to my system’s file tree, except it only contains all the files that I modified or added and only their respective directories. From there I just use
rsyncto sync those files/file tree to the system’s/.It’s convenient to see what changes I currently have but it requires a bit of manual maintenance. I only really started doing it that way because I was learning how to use rsync and I just kept going on with it because it was working for me.
I’m only working with my laptop, android phone and two Raspberry Pi’s so I can get with my little rsync based setup.
