

Your dotfiles and you - paolomainardi
http://www.twinbit.it/en/blog/your-dotfiles-and-you
This is an introductory article describing what dotfiles are and why you should treat them as a life long software project.
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izmty
Related: See using GNU Stow for the same result

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331485)

[http://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-
stow/](http://taihen.org/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/)

~~~
grota1981
Nice, never heard of that, thanks

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ygra
Wouldn't something like Dropbox (or some kind of hacky rsync/shellscript/cron
replacement) be more appropriate for that? Usually you don't want to _version_
your configuration files; you just want them to be the same in all places. And
with a repository I still have to think about committing, pushing and pulling.

~~~
weland
My dotfiles have acquired enough cruft and interdependence in the many years
they've been written that I certainly benefit from keeping them under version
control. If all you have is a dozen lines in .bashrc and .tmuxrc it's ok, but
once you pile up custom scripts and configs it gets out of hand quickly and
you actually end up with regressions.

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holyjaw
I've been meaning to look in to ThoughtBot's RCM [1] dotfile management system
for something like this, btw.

[1]: [https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm](https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm)

