Hello, i would like to know how you manage your dotfiles.
Do you use some gui or tui?
There are many ways i don’t what to do.
Probably im going to do git repo with lazygit. I like tuis. I am managing files on two artix linux systems 1- pc and 2- laptop
Nix, but I’d only recommend it if you share my same brand of mental illness
I also share this brand of illness.
As I was reluctant going all in, having kept them in git since 2012, I still keep a few of them in their own separate repository. I load them as a nix flake input, and put the files in the expected place using nixos. Works OK, but adds a bit of a roundtrip if you are experimenting with changes often.
This also allows me to share some of them to my work machine, which uses nix, and other files on other systems that dont.
That said, I consider myself all in nix quite some time ago, and have moved more and more of the config over to the nix repo using the nix language for config instead of the input flake config file approach. Iterating on it is much faster this way.
chezmoi does everything I need. It’s really nice; would recommend.
Don’t need to I use nix
This is how I handle my nix configs though
Love it!!
I use Syncthing with a folder called “Configuration Files” where I drop all my sync-able configs and dotfiles and I simply symlink them as needed.
So there’s at least the two of us doing it this way. Syncthing is an absolutely fantastic tool.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s more effective at this than I thought because even though I use git a lot for programming and projects, I’ve admittedly forgotten far too often to commit and push/pull trivial changes on devices and in most cases, all I need is just for dotfiles to sync across devices anyway.
I am syncing a whole lot more than just dotfiles and have done so for years. Admittedly, I am running an always-on-instance (multiple, in fact…). Syncthing hasn’t put a foot wrong in over a decade.
I am donating a small amount to the project every month and would like to encourage others to do the same.
I use a bare git repo. After the initial set-up its just the basic git commands but invoked with a
gitdfalias. I wrote a (non-monetized) blog post here about it.If still needing a tui you could write a simple helper script to call the commands.
I use home-manager to manage most of my dotfiles and store them in a git repository. Additionally, I just symlink the configurations I’m too lazy to write as home-manager options (yet), which in turn is a decent way to make migrating to home-manager options less upfront.
I do a git repo for my dot files with an installer that configures it based on whether I’m using Linux, macOS, or FreeBSD; a server or desktop; and whether I’m in bash or zsh. It also includes a bunch of functions and aliases that I find useful. It’s not always pretty because I also use it as a practical place to try new shell script bits when I have time. I’m hoping to change some things around soon thanks to some ideas from Dave Eddy’s bash course at ysap.sh.
i used to do this, but couldn’t figure out how to stay on top of the changes introduced by distro’s and updates to the apps; did you figure these out somehow?
I pretty much stick to straight bash and core utils, so it’s not much of a burden. Plus on the Linux side, I mostly stay with Debian and its derivatives, which limits some of the work.
But really I don’t consider every feature of my dot files to be a finished product. The core stuff is reliable, but if I catch a problem with anything more esoteric or if I see some functionality that looks interesting, it’s a brain teaser I get to tackle.
I pretty much stick to straight bash and core utils, so it’s not much of a burden…
this has worked fairly well for me too and i’ve applied this logic to a few desktop environment apps that are seemingly ubiquitous in all of the distros.
though, i still admire (and sometimes envy) the customizations that people make to their environments.
I just wrote a bash script copies the relevant files or directories I want to back up from either ~ or ~/.config and places them in a local git directory which I then push to a private repo on Codeberg. Super janky and manual but I update dotfiles so seldom that it works for what I need.
https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm once upon a time, but I haven’t really had multiple dev computers for a while
Chezmoi
It’s the only one that just works and has enough features for me, but not too many.
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Heard about this on Linux Unplugged a few weeks back. Haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks pretty cool.
Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into
${HOME}/projects/handy-sciptsand then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a
git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git pushso that all your devices are synced up.For ZSH, I have a script that automatically installs oh-my-zsh and a bunch of zsh plugins, and changes my default shell to ZSH.
For everything else, some files will just get copied over, others left behind. I only “manage” them when I need to view/edit them.
Nothing at all. If things go south on the install I’ll have a clean slate. Really the only thing I have backed up are keys, everything else is nonessential.
Glad I’m not the only one.
