Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub

#71

Post by chrysoprace » Wed, May 08, 2024, 11:24 PM UTC

p5a0u9l wrote: post #61

kjuulh wrote: post #5

This site seems much more like an some of the awesome- repositories on github than a guide. Although it does give some extra information on the packages. To not make it took negative. I personally use Chezmoi, which I've been super happy with. The ability to maintain files in a central repository and then pull them into the file system on an update is quite nice. You can handle merge conflicts and whatnot between you…

I guess I don’t quite get it. It’s not a ton of work for me to manage things with git, symlinks, and a makefile. Clearly chezmoi adds some polish and maybe additional features, but I don’t see how that outweighs learning a custom tool for this one thing.

The thing is that there isn't a lot to learn unless you have complex use cases (I have one, so I need to use chezmoi's advanced features). It just uses git under the hood and does a diff between your repository and the actual locations of your dotfiles, so if you wanted to (and I often do) you can just `cd` straight into chezmoi's repo and use `git`.

My complex use case is that I use all three of the main OS' and so there are some dotfiles for desktop apps that live in Windows' home directory and some that live in WSL, so having something manage that for me is pretty nice.

Re: Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub

#72

Post by ElijahLynn » Wed, May 08, 2024, 11:40 PM UTC

This seems overwhelming. A bunch of paths to go down. No clear recommendation.

Re: Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub

#73

Post by xk3 » Thu, May 09, 2024, 5:25 AM UTC

josephd79 wrote: post #6

just setup a bare repo and call it a day. https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles original thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070797

All you need is gitignore: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/blob/main/.gitigno...

Re: Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub

#74

Post by eternityforest » Thu, May 09, 2024, 11:14 AM UTC

> Submodules make managing dotfile dependencies so much easier.

I'm impressed by the dedication of anyone who has enough dotfile config to use a submodule!

I still like Vorta for dotfiles, just because it's trivial to set up and only uses tools I already use for other things. Most of the dotfiles I want to back up have secrets, so GitHub isn't really an option.

SyncThing seems like it could work well for dotfiles too, with some kind of frontend that copied stuff to a sync folder.