Dotfiles are useful for all kinds of config on your machine.
At some point, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time editing my dotfiles to personalise my terminal. Inevitably, I had to change machines. Imagine having to lose all those hours of sweat, tears, & effort. Could never be me.
Enter GNU stow + a git repository
Stow allows you to keep one directory as the source of truth for all your dotfiles, meaning you can version control that stuff easy.
You then use sub-directories to manage the different types of config files,
in my case nvim, tmux, zsh, tmuxifier
How I stow
Stow relies on how you organise the contents of your sub-directories, Then places those dotfiles where they belong in the home directory, as symlinks.
To illustrate, let’s look at my zsh & tmux configs:
~/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc
- If I run
stow zshin the~/dotfilesdirectory, the symlink is created at~/.zshrc
~/dotfiles/tmux/.tmux.conf
- Similarly, if I run
stow tmuxin the~/dotfilesdirectory, the symlink is created at~/.tmux.conf
Also worth mentioning, your dotfiles directory has to be in the home directory for this to work,
ie ~/dotfiles. Stow places the symlinks in the parent directory of where you run the command from.
Tracking stable configs
Another thing I like about stow + git -> I can keep track of the last stable version of any config, which gives me more confidence to experiment and change things around.