I use a Github repo + gnu stow. I wrote a little post about it (http://juanda.me/managing-your-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow). Notice that I've made my dotfiles repo private since then so you can't check it out, but the post still draws the general idea.

Mine are on github. If you want to use this setup simply copy and paste the contents of your original files and use the `makesymlinks.sh` script to create the links. It takes me 30 seconds to setup a new computer with it.

https://github.com/garyharan/dotfiles

I was searching for this earlier, I came across a HN post which someone from Atlassian write up really nicely: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/02/best-way-to-sto...

No extra tools (just git), no symlinks.

I have different needs in my dotfiles for different contexts, so I've created a system where each file is represented by a folder, which contains separate file snippets for each context.

So in my vimrc folder, I've got a work file, a school file, a home file, and a base file (which applies everywhere). Then I have a bash script that stitches all the relevant chunks together into a cohesive file for a given location. It can even do sub-locations by adding underscores to the name. E.g. 'work_nas' will produce a file consisting of the base, work and work_nas files, concatenated together.

This all sits in a private git repo, and I just manually copy the output files to wherever they belong whenever there's an update to them. I've been thinking for a while about writing a script to copy them into place, but GNU stow looks pretty interesting.

I use a Github repo, but I actually store it on Dropbox. I then symlink everything into place on a new computer.

Any change I make to a dotfile then shows up on any other machines.

http://github.com/napcs/dotfiles/

Stow is probably the simplest way to do it. The only weird thing is the directory structure I have with `.` prefixes in order to be linked as I want them inside my home.

Besides that, I don't see how a better way to do it.

I store them in a dotfiles repo that gets pushed to Github occasionally. They get symlinked to my home directory, and I use thoughtbot's rcm[0] tool for managing that. Then I just use a small script that I keep updated to handle installation and setup on a fresh computer. I'll need to take a look at gnu stow now. It seems like it'd be a slightly simpler alternative, and would keep my dotfiles folder a bit better organized.

0. https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

I use vcsh:

https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

I have separate repos for SSH, Bash, VIM, and other stuff (like .inputrc).

I do exactly this myself, and it works remarkably well. I had a few conflicts I had to work around between different packages, but the updated vim package directory structure has mostly solved that problem.

EDIT: The biggest problem, for me, is that since they are all dotfiles, they are invisible to normal ls operations within the stow directory. It's a minor nit, but it can be quite annoying to run up against.

I store my configs in a git repo on Seafile/Syncwerk (Dropbox alternative). This gives me a seamless experience on Unix, OSX and Windows where I just have to link to them from my home directory when on a new computer.

Yes, it took an initial investment but now it just works everywhere and maintenance is low.

(Some people say git repos in clouds sync are bad, but I have had zero problems with them over the years.)