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
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 use Syncthing with a folder called “Configuration Files” where I drop all my sync-able configs and dotfiles and I simply symlink them as needed.
So there’s at least the two of us doing it this way. Syncthing is an absolutely fantastic tool.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s more effective at this than I thought because even though I use git a lot for programming and projects, I’ve admittedly forgotten far too often to commit and push/pull trivial changes on devices and in most cases, all I need is just for dotfiles to sync across devices anyway.
I am syncing a whole lot more than just dotfiles and have done so for years. Admittedly, I am running an always-on-instance (multiple, in fact…). Syncthing hasn’t put a foot wrong in over a decade.
I am donating a small amount to the project every month and would like to encourage others to do the same.
chezmoi does everything I need. It’s really nice; would recommend.
I use Chezmoi and a git repo for keeping mine in sync with each other across several machines.
Recently learned about dotbot and it is perfect for me. Had a custom script to manage stow before.
Nix (home-manager) 😬
I keep most of them in a git repository that I check out at
~/.config. Some software doesn’t follow the XDG Base Directory Specification out of the box but can be configured to do so; the Arch Linux wiki has an article about it. For software that cannot be configured to follow the standard I have dedicated repositories, like for OpenSSH.Gnu stow and a git repository.
stow creates bulk symlinks according to the folder structure.
I don’t… when setting up a new system I just copy what I need from any random machine I have logged into at the time. As I need different config for different systems it doesn’t really make sense to have one perfect config on all either…
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.
I don’t understand what to manage about dotfiles. You mean backups?
In my case, I use several different types of machines: Personal Linux desktop, personal low end Linux laptop, remote servers where I have sudo, work Mac, shared remote work servers where I don’t have sudo. I want my setup to be basically the same everywhere so that my muscle memory works, but there are some things that also need to be a bit different for each. Hence, a dot files manager that lets me run one command to keep my environment consistent in all those different targets. I use chezmoi + git for it nowadays.
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.
I pretty much stick to straight bash and core utils, so it’s not much of a burden…
this has worked fairly well for me too and i’ve applied this logic to a few desktop environment apps that are seemingly ubiquitous in all of the distros.
though, i still admire (and sometimes envy) the customizations that people make to their environments.
