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Comment by iRomain | Hacker News Reader

For my dotfiles [1] I use https://www.chezmoi.io which I really like using and stuck (as opposed to my previous dotfiles attempts which didn’t stick). Albeit I have only been using it for a few months as opposed to the author’s decade.

I guess the idea is to find the one tool/methodology that sticks with you.

[1] https://github.com/politician/dotfiles

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I managed my dotfiles across many distros using a bare multi-branch Git repo. But eventually it became a chore to share snippets among them. Chezmoi is little thin utility wrapper over Git that handles this usecase beautifully. I switched to Chezmoi over the weekend and just shudder to the thought of how much time I could have saved had I found it earlier.

I find it odd that people use extra management software for their dotfiles. Most of the files are in `~/.config` anyways, so you can track this folder like a regular directory in git. And for the software that does insist on writing into `~` directly you can set up symlinks, with a script or manually.

Tracking `~/.config` as a regular directory in git only works if all your machines are near-identical. If you want to share dotfiles between, say, Linux and macOS, or between your home and work machines, then a dotfile manager makes it much much easier.

For more reasons, see: https://www.chezmoi.io/why-use-chezmoi/

Disclaimer: I'm the author of chezmoi

Unrelated, but thank you for chezmoi, it's a clever little utility very well designed. I use it to manage many distinct Arch-based systems and soon will be moving my Ubuntu servers to it. Congratulations!

Thank you <3

> I find it odd that people use extra management software for their dotfiles

> you can set up symlinks, with a script or manually.

So yeah… that’s exactly what dotfile managers do with standardised scripts.

Except they are, themselves, a new dependency. And might even introduce more dependencies themselves.

I mean, maybe? But they could just be a binary.

Also, is writing your own scripts to symlink appropriate dot files across different environments not also a new dependency?

You can ship a portable shell script with your config files. Portable shell script is supported out-of-the-box everywhere where you have dotfiles. No extra installing necessary. Contrast this to binaries, which are not portable and need to be re-generated for every possible architecture and ABI.

> which are not portable and need to be re-generated for every possible architecture and ABI.

I mean we’re talking about Linux dotfiles. At worst, you might need a binary for arm, if amd64 isn’t enough. I’m not clear on your point about ABI incompatibility for simple binaries.

Its still work to be done. Thats something that is not even an /issue/ if you dont need much except the tools that already come with your distribution.

Like, i think its best to wait like, 10 years, and see how the whole thing worked out. Maybe we need another systemd or two until people realize that software is still a liability even if you aren't the one who is maintaining it.

I would recommend checking out GNU Stow, I’m quite happy with it - super straightforward to use.

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