101–110 of 152 posts
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Worse is better.
Worse is not better any more than a tough man stops short of a tender chicken. Better is better.
https://gist.github.com/b7r6/57b9057b87a56e98c4d306d83eed5dc...
I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years, but I originally started off by rolling my own dotfiles setup with a Git repo about 6 years ago: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment I don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need (per-machine config, secrets, templating), but I get a deep satisfaction from the fact that I understand eve…
The last few years I've rarely had to switch machines, so maybe chezmoi is overkill now, but it works well, so I'm in no rush to simplify again just for the sake of it (and who knows if I'll need chezmoi's features for real again in the future).
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.
People shy from Nix because of supposed complexity but it really is the only real solution to this sort of problem. It's not really that much more difficult to learn, and in fact if you are willing, AI works really well generating nix config.
It's also a massive pain the ass to work with
Once you hit the Chezmoi stage, you're only about 6 months from Nix and Home Manager. I mean, why climb _almost_ to the top of a mountain and then just sit down?
I find this is a key feature. If a file is edited, git shows it as dirty, and I get to decide if I discard of commit the change. No extra steps required.
> By the time Homebrew and a couple of tools have run on a new Mac, files like ~/.zprofile and ~/.gitconfig already exist.
I don't get why you'd manually provision those files instead of just putting them in dotfiles.
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Personally, I found that most tools in this space tried to do too much or were too complex. I previously wrote a minimal one in Rust, but eventually re-wrote it into less than 200 lines of shell, which works pretty much anywhere, without having to install anything at all, and is part of the dotfiles repository itself:
https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/dotfiles/tree/ac97cb196f02cafa...
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Nix's complexity isn't with itself, its if you try to step one bit off the beaten path where it immediately starts to grate.
That problem is overstated. I've been dozens of custom packages and modules and it's not that much more complex that basic Nix config, and in fact is a huge positive, not negative. How easy can you write config that packages a binary and/or sets up a new service reproducibly? I'd much rather do that on Nix than Ubuntu or Arch for sure.
This one is good, though, and very thorough—even though it's Mac-centric.
Eventually, I wrote my own bidirectional sync tool that synchronizes a git checkout (for example, ~/.dotfiles) with the actual home directory. I run it as a systemd service, so I can simply edit or delete files in ~/.dotfiles, and everything else happens automatically.
I can add or remove files in the repository, and they will automatically be created or removed in their synchronized locations. At the same time, the target directories can contain other unrelated files, including an entire $HOME, and this does not interfere with synchronization in any way.
The bidirectional sync is particularly useful when a program, such as vs code, decides to modify its own configuration files, or when I'm feeling lazy and just want to edit ~/.bashrc directly and commit the changes later.
Achieving this requires some careful logic that, hopefully, I've managed to get right. At least at the time I wrote it, I hadn't seen these implemented in other systems.
Oh, and I use the same sync for some files I need to /etc, only for that I run sudo scripts and dont' have a always-on service for obvious reasons.
I'd be happy if someone else found it useful too: https://github.com/senotrusov/etcdotica
I've never really understood why people get so fancy with their setups when you can just plop a git repo into your home directory. I suspect it has to do with people being unfamiliar with git.
Git works until you need conditional logic such as platform-specific files or templating.
You can make forks or branches. Perfect for separating your work specific or private configs
You can use a filter like https://github.com/darkfeline/qualia-go
You can use a shell script (stored in the same git repo). You need you run an external tool with dotfile managers anyway, a shell script gives you more flexibility and doesn't need an extra dependency which might break at an inopportune time. The last thing you need is your dotfile manager breaking when you're setting up a new machine (ask me how I know)
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That problem is overstated. I've been dozens of custom packages and modules and it's not that much more complex that basic Nix config, and in fact is a huge positive, not negative. How easy can you write config that packages a binary and/or sets up a new service reproducibly? I'd much rather do that on Nix than Ubuntu or Arch for sure.
If you modify a base package, like maybe to apply some minor patch on a systemd executable as an example, is there a way to avoid having to recompile basically all installed packages (for being at least indirect dependents)? Had a problem like that about a decade back.
That's the great thing about nix, it should actually compile LESS than other distros, because, you can have multiple versions of the same lib on the same machine. You just create another version of the package and only patch the packages that need it. You don't even have this option on other distros. Name one other distro that lets you run multiple versions of glibc natively (not containers or flatpaks or whatever).