Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub

[This] way (linked from the tutorials section of the page) is a great way to version your dotfiles without symlinks or installer scripts.

[This]: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

tl;dr: Create a .gitignore in your ~ with an asterisk on the first line and `!.dotfilename` on subsequent lines; the asterisk means Git will ignore everything, and the ! means Git will un-ignore that specific file or directory. (Be sure to include the .gitignore file itself.) Use Git as normal and push. To deploy on another machine/account, the easiest method is to check out as normal into a temporary directory, then move the .git directory from that temporary directory into your ~ and run `git revert`. Git will see all of the missing dotfiles as changes to be reverted and revert them into existence.

I use this method, it's great. WAY superior to and WAY easier than using symlinks and having to constantly copy/move and symlink things to a git repo.

I use this script (which I modified a bit from the Atlassian one) to bootstrap it on a new $HOME dir (replace "***YOUR_GIT_REPO_ADDRESS***" with your address; also, you need to copy the function ,cfg into your .*rc file for command-line use):

    #!/bin/bash
    set -euo pipefail # the usual stuff

    # TODO: copy the below function into your .*rc file
    function ,cfg {
        /usr/bin/git --git-dir="$HOME/.cfg/" --work-tree="$HOME" "$@"
    }

    # TODO: replace '***YOUR_GIT_REPO_ADDRESS***' below
    git clone --bare git@***YOUR_GIT_REPO_ADDRESS***/.cfg "$HOME/.cfg"
    ,cfg config status.showUntrackedFiles no

    if ,cfg checkout; then
        # worked fine, we're done
        echo "Checked out config."
    else
        # it failed, so assume we need to move some files out of the way
        echo "Backing up pre-existing dot files."
        mkdir -p "$HOME/.config-backup"
        ,cfg checkout 2>&1 | grep -e "\s+\." | awk "{'print $1'}" | xargs -I{} mv {} "$HOME/.config-backup"/{}
        ,cfg checkout || (echo "Still cannot checkout configs; see messages and fix." && exit 1)
        echo "Checked out config."
    fi

I also have a git alias to commit files that are tracked with a message:

    ctm = commit -a -u -m           #commit all tracked files with message

So you can do like this to commit changes and push them:

    ,cfg ctm "I modified my .zshrc"
    ,cfg push*

Can you provide a link to more current recommendations for Vim? I've used this article so I'd like to know what it got wrong.

Also, codespaces has an option to deploy (your) dotfiles by selecting a repo that will be used. It runs install or similarly named file to do so.

https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/customizing-your-codes...