On: Versioning Your Home Directory

[lionyo]

I use this: https://github.com/holman/dotfiles.git

Dotfiles are stored in git, and run a script that creates symlinks to those dotfiles

[tomjakubowski → lionyo]

I do something like this, but I lean on GNU Stow[1] to manage the symlinks.

My ~ directory tree, early on in setting up a new system, might look like:

    ~/
      .config/
      dotfiles/
        i3/
          .config/
            i3/
              config
        zsh/
          .config/
            zshenv.d/
              README.txt
          .zshenv
          .zshrc

When I want to use a package, I cd to ~/dotfiles and run:

    stow zsh

Running that sets up symlinks rooted one directory above, ~. Now ~ looks like:

    ~/
      .config/
        zshenv.d/ -> ../dotfiles/zsh/.config/zshenv.d/
      dotfiles/
        (as earlier)
      .zshenv -> ../dotfiles/zsh/.zshenv
      .zshrc -> ../dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc

Because ~/.config already existed, stow made the zsh symlink inside it. If ~/.config hadn't existed, stow would have symlinked it from ~/dotfiles/zsh.

To remove the symlinks stow set up:

    stow -D zsh

I did eventually set up a wrapper script to pass a few default arguments to stow, to ignore certain files I use for documentation. But stow does all of the work of managing the symlinks.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html#Introduct...