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Comment by anshargal | Hacker News Reader

The following .gitignore is my favorite way to commit an (almost) empty folder to git:

  # Ignore everything in this directory 
  *
  # Except this file
  !.gitignore

.gitignore can be present in any directory and there is a way to unignore a wildcard

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I was looking at someone's dotfiles on Github a while back and they employed this method. Essentially they made their entire home directory a git repo but used gitignore to ignore everything but the dotfiles they wanted to backup. It was a pretty nifty setup

I feel obligated to point out vcsh [1], which is likely already packaged for your operating system.

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

The main selling point is that you can set up various git repos for different things. I have one for SSH keys (and no, that does not get pushed anywhere except to my own private server), VIM, neovim, bash, and 'other' (for misc config files like .dir_colors, .gitconfig, etc.).

A nifty setup until you run a git command like `git clean -fx` somewhere under your home directory that you think is another git directory but isn't. Happy restore from backups time.

Another option is to clone the dotfiles repo to your workspace. Then create symbolic links in your home directory. Like:

ln -fs ~/workspace/dotfiles/vimrc ~/.vimrc

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