Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by anschwa | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

anschwa·

The best way I've found to organize dotfiles is to simply use a bare git repo.

> git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles`

> alias dot="git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME"

> dot config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

View on HN

I have tried this and it feels nice but I don't want to use git from the command line. I like magit or otherwise fork-app. I didn't find a way to use the bare repo with any of them in an easy way, so I gave up. I use stow now. It alright, but I'll change it in an instant if I found a way to use my tools with a bare git repo.

I use magit as well. I don't end up editing my dotfiles very often anyway, so it's not a big deal to execute a couple git commands here and there. The convenience of not linking files all over the place or depending on other scripts is pretty great.

I agree, but for me, I prefer having some symlinks than having to deal with git CLI :(.

Oh my god. This is a game changer. Thanks a ton for this enlightenment.

Any gotchas I need to be aware of?

I've been using GNU Stow to manage mine and haven't yet run into issues but it did bring some fiction.

Probably risking committing secrets if you plan to use this git folder as a sort of "backup" for your dot-files.

One thing to be aware of is that you need a version of git that supports —-worktree.

That may or may not be an issue but the version of git that comes with Ubuntu 16.04LTS for example doesn’t support it.

This is pretty similar to what YADM does, except that the repo lives in ~/.yadm and the cli has some facilities for encrypting/decrypting sensitive files. It also has the capability of running a bootstrap script when you first pull down your dotfiles which is super nice if you need to install some software on your machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com