Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#1

Post by speckx » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi
rednafi.com

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#2

Post by lucideer » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

I must've tried to set up stow five or six times over the years, in between various hand rolled custom setups. I can't put my finger on why but I set up chez moi & it's been my setup since, much longer than any previous solution.

Chez moi is definitely not without its rough edges but it seems to have gotten the subtle essentials right enough for adhd me to not have abandoned it yet.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#3

Post by guhcampos » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #2

I must've tried to set up stow five or six times over the years, in between various hand rolled custom setups. I can't put my finger on why but I set up chez moi & it's been my setup since, much longer than any previous solution. Chez moi is definitely not without its rough edges but it seems to have gotten the subtle essentials right enough for adhd me to not have abandoned it yet.

I used stow for a long time, then tried Ansible, but eventually settled into good old Make.

`make dotfiles` just creates a bunch of symlinks, takes 5 minutes, all good and happy. Everything is modular, declarative, simple. Never looked back.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#4

Post by sureglymop » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #2

I must've tried to set up stow five or six times over the years, in between various hand rolled custom setups. I can't put my finger on why but I set up chez moi & it's been my setup since, much longer than any previous solution. Chez moi is definitely not without its rough edges but it seems to have gotten the subtle essentials right enough for adhd me to not have abandoned it yet.

Same here. I would say chezmoi has almost a bit too many features. If one is into yak shaving there is a lot to explore. It's only a negative for me because I forget half of them everytime I read the docs. But I can hardly blame it for that, it's great!

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#5

Post by drdexebtjl » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

I had similar problems with GNU Stow, but switched to Nix and Home Manager instead.

I think Chezmoi's templates and file naming conventions don't click for me, but it's nice to see a good variety in this problem space.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#6

Post by rochak » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

I've been using [yadm](https://yadm.io/) instead which works really well!

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#7

Post by spudlyo » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.

Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#8

Post by mmh0000 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

I’ve always managed this problem in a different way. I don’t know if my way is better, but it works really well for me.

I treat my powerful desktop computer as my main machine. Then I have a bunch of laptops.

Then I just rsync my entire home directory out to all the laptops.

From there. The rule is quite simple. Any file created on a laptop are considered ephemeral. If I create data that I have to keep. It gets rsynced back the other direction to the main machine.

This process has served me well for at least 15 years now and is supported by a small handful of shell scripts to automate this process

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#9

Post by linhns » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #2

I must've tried to set up stow five or six times over the years, in between various hand rolled custom setups. I can't put my finger on why but I set up chez moi & it's been my setup since, much longer than any previous solution. Chez moi is definitely not without its rough edges but it seems to have gotten the subtle essentials right enough for adhd me to not have abandoned it yet.

I nearly jumped from GNU Stow, but settled when I find the —-no-folding flag

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#10

Post by arrakeen » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

i feel like using GNU stow to manage your dotfiles has always been a hack.. has it ever been a supported usecase?

stow is an indispensable tool for me to manage /usr/local for manually installed software. my workflow goes:

  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/myapp
  make && make install
  stow myapp

now, myapp and all its supporting files are in the right place in /usr/local. if i want to "uninstall", i just run

  stow -D myapp