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Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

brandon.invergo.net

61–70 of 116 posts

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#63
post #29

Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with having a regular git repo anywhere you want with all of your dotfiles and them symlink those files to where they need to go? If you wanted to you could && a few symlinks and other commands into 1 copy / paste'able command to get up and running really quickly. It's also painless to manage secrets by sourcing in optional files. It also works nicely when you want files living…

I still remember when git was the hot new version control system, so old fashioned sounds funny to me.

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#64
post #7

I have found that managing dotfiles is not enough. The dotfiles serve no purpose without the software that uses them. My method is to write small scripts, I call them setuplets, that install the software and then symlink the dotfile to its master that I manage in git. In the simplest case, it is just a two line script in a directory, but I have one for each program, and a tool to select which I run when setting up a…

I have a similar setup, but I don't have to write that script myself. Instead, I uses Zinit (https://github.com/zdharma/zinit) to let it setup the tools for me.

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#65
post #60
post #7

I have found that managing dotfiles is not enough. The dotfiles serve no purpose without the software that uses them. My method is to write small scripts, I call them setuplets, that install the software and then symlink the dotfile to its master that I manage in git. In the simplest case, it is just a two line script in a directory, but I have one for each program, and a tool to select which I run when setting up a…

I don't want to sound condescendant, but are you not basically doing packages ? Instead of standard packages your distro gives you, you have "custom" packages that also contain more specific installation instructions (write file with specific content, set environment variables, ...). I know that PKGBUILDs in Arch allow you to do such things if needed. Bonus: now even configuration files can be linked to the software…

Because package manager are different across different distro? Also, custom setup allows you to have those tools even if you don't have root permission to install them with package manager.

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#66
post #29

Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with having a regular git repo anywhere you want with all of your dotfiles and them symlink those files to where they need to go? If you wanted to you could && a few symlinks and other commands into 1 copy / paste'able command to get up and running really quickly. It's also painless to manage secrets by sourcing in optional files. It also works nicely when you want files living…

Yeah, the command is literally (cd ~; ln -s source-location/{.,}[A-z]* .) which is a lot easier than installing all that stuff.

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#67
post #29

Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with having a regular git repo anywhere you want with all of your dotfiles and them symlink those files to where they need to go? If you wanted to you could && a few symlinks and other commands into 1 copy / paste'able command to get up and running really quickly. It's also painless to manage secrets by sourcing in optional files. It also works nicely when you want files living…

> Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with having a regular git repo anywhere you want with all of your dotfiles and them symlink those files to where they need to go?

I prefer to skip the symlinks, and just directly use the git repository as my home directory. (I have a sizable .gitignore for things I don't want to track.)

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#69
post #29

Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with having a regular git repo anywhere you want with all of your dotfiles and them symlink those files to where they need to go? If you wanted to you could && a few symlinks and other commands into 1 copy / paste'able command to get up and running really quickly. It's also painless to manage secrets by sourcing in optional files. It also works nicely when you want files living…

Stow does this, it also has a --dotfiles switch so you can save your files as `dot-vimrc`, `dot-bashrc`, etc... so you don't have a bunch of hidden files in your repo

Too bad that's broken for directory names: https://github.com/aspiers/stow/issues/33

Re: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

#70
post #18

I like dotbot [0] and have been using it for a while. How do people manage secrets, I am encrypting with keybase, but really want to move away from it. [0]: https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

I make a script purely with `export secret=...` lines and keep it in a local folder and KeePassXC. When I need secrets I manually source it. Not super automatic, but I dont add a lot of secrets a lot of the time
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