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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Is this using ”dotfiles” as a general term for ”text based configuration files”? Is this a thing?

I only have two actual dotfiles on my system (git and one more)

Lots of config files begin with a dot themselves or because they are inside dot-names directories (ie xdg config default to ~/.config)

At least on Linux they do yes. But this is cross platform. A Normal total number of dotfiles on a windows system is about 0 or 1.

This is not true. Open your user folder and there will be tons of dotfiles. If you use git with ssh or Rust (.cargo) or C# (.nuget) and many other tools. In fact, even .config is started to show up now.

I guess devs are tired of %APPDATA% ?

Yes, I have 2 (nuget and git). But I obviously have many more text based configuration files than those. They just happen to have a name with a dot.

Are you using windows? I feel like dotfiles are much more common on unix-like systems. For me I've got dotfiles for zhs, ssh, git, two for my window manager, vim, and much more. I've even got one for nethack. I quite like it, I get new laptops up and running and feeling like home in a matter of minutes.

Yes windows. That’s my point: dotfiles are synonymous with ”configuration files” on Linux/Unix but not elsewhere so making a ”cross platform dotfiles manager” seems like a contradiction almost.

Even windows, MS made stuff has dotfiles.

By historical accident, Unix-like shells tend to hide by default files whose names begin with a dot. This led to programs naming their config files ".$program_name" and throwing them into $HOME. It's no longer cool to do this, but the tradition lives on.

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