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How do you manage your dotfiles? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by no_sle3p@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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I'm wondering if there is a new tool out there that I'm missing out on.

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[–] gamma@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I've done symlinks into a separate directory before, but by far my favorite method is to just let ~ be a git repo. It's maximally simple, no other tooling needed besides git.

There are a few key steps to making this work well:

echo '*' > ~/.gitignore: This way git status isn't full of untracked files. I can still git add -f what I actually want to track.
git branch -m dots: For clarity in my shell prompt.
[ -d "$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin" ] && PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin and similar if there's config I want to apply only to certain hosts.

[–] drdnl@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty happy with nixos these days, after the initial (crazy) learning curve. But I really like the creative simplicity of this idea

[–] gamma@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

~~Stole~~ Forked this idea from Drew Devault.

I'm looking at NixOS now for my server, and while I understand the host config, I'm curious whether I could integrate this into my config in some way.