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Comment by kjuulh | Hacker News Reader

This site seems much more like an some of the awesome-<insert tech here> repositories on github than a guide. Although it does give some extra information on the packages.

To not make it took negative. I personally use Chezmoi, which I've been super happy with. The ability to maintain files in a central repository and then pull them into the file system on an update is quite nice.

You can handle merge conflicts and whatnot between your local copy and the upstream dot files. You can opt your files into using go templates in your files which is useful when I need to maintain differences in configs between mac and linux, or in general for just storing secrets out of your dotfiles.

There are some small annoyances but overall it is the only dotfile manager, I've managed to stick with.

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Seconding Chezmoi, it's what I use, and it works well.

Third here, it's the easiest tool to setup dotfiles that work on machines ranging from RHEL7 to latest MacOS. Haven't dealt with Windows dotfiles though.

Fourthing Chezmoi. I tried so many dotfiles tools and it's the only one that does just enough, gets out of my way, and "just works".

Being able to run `chezmoi diff` and `chezmoi apply` are game changers.

Another happy chezmoi user here... I progressed from symlinks -> Homeshick -> yadm -> chezmoi

One of chezmoi killer features is how it handles secrets. Either the secret can be encrypted using age/gpg or (super cool) it integrates with you password manager (I used Bitwarden).

This is super useful for me, as I pair chezmoi with dotenv, so when I switch directories, my environment variables are auto populated, including secrets that are pulled directly from my password manager.

I guess I don’t quite get it. It’s not a ton of work for me to manage things with git, symlinks, and a makefile. Clearly chezmoi adds some polish and maybe additional features, but I don’t see how that outweighs learning a custom tool for this one thing.

The thing is that there isn't a lot to learn unless you have complex use cases (I have one, so I need to use chezmoi's advanced features). It just uses git under the hood and does a diff between your repository and the actual locations of your dotfiles, so if you wanted to (and I often do) you can just `cd` straight into chezmoi's repo and use `git`.

My complex use case is that I use all three of the main OS' and so there are some dotfiles for desktop apps that live in Windows' home directory and some that live in WSL, so having something manage that for me is pretty nice.

I just use stow and git with a Makefile as well, and I could certainly do without stow these days (I can just write a Makefile target for it, but haven’t bothered).

I just back up my files to USB drive, and then transfer them to new machines manually.

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