On: Ask HN: What do you use to manage dotfiles?

[telotortium]

For posterity, note that this will fail if your home directory isn't empty. To get around that, clone the repo's working directory into a temporary directory first and then delete that directory,

    git clone --separate-git-dir=$HOME/.myconf /path/to/repo $HOME/myconf-tmp
    cp ~/myconf-tmp/.gitmodules ~  # If you use Git submodules
    rm -r ~/myconf-tmp/
    alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.myconf/ --work-tree=$HOME'

and then proceed as before.

[durdn → telotortium]

I found out exactly the same problem :)