using stow for dotfiles

Configuration and settings of my shell, Vim editor and of lots of other applications are stored as dotfiles. so my dotfiles setup assumes this repo is located in the root of your home directory ~/dotfiles. Shawn McElroy Jun 19, 2019 Originally published at writingco.de on Jun 18, 2019 ・9 min read. How I manage my dotfiles using GNU Stow # posts # bash # dotfiles. You will not be copying anything manually. Let's with only using the .bashrc from above. Primer to managing dotfiles with GNU Stow. Originally published at writingco.de. I clone the repo into ~/.dotfiles, cd into it, then run stow from there. Let’s with only using the .zshrc from above. linux unix dotfiles git gnu bsd version-control gnustow. In fact, I'd say that it promotes it. You want to keep a nice repo in git of all your dotfiles, but copying them back and forth is a lot of work, and creating a repo in your home directory is problematic. otherwise you'll need to use the -d flag with the repo directory location. and Stow will symlink the files in your ruby-on-rails package into two different project directories. But in the meantime, I can provide a quick summary of how my dotfiles are setup. If you need an example, All my dotfiles are managed using stow here. That is a recipe for disaster! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment below :) Stow makes it really easy to manage dotfiles. Each application has an associated sub-directory (ex: dotfiles/emacs), which contains all of the dotfiles/folders associated with that application. Remove, backup, rename, your original .zshrc (the one that’s not in your dotfiles), because we need that name for Stow and we are going to replace it with symlink. I recently learned how to use GNU stow to reconcile this. A lot of developers spend so much time on the command line that they call it their second home. This is a cross-post from my content blog. Wrapping Up. Enter GNU Stow how it works by default the stow command will create symlinks for files in the parent directory of where you execute the command. They customise their cli applications like vim, tmux, weechat, write their own git aliases and have… This allows you to keep the real files bottled up in one directory. In order to place these symlinks, stow … If you haven’t seen it before, I highly suggest reading the post I have linked above. Using stow: Now that the dotfiles folder is set up, we can actually use Stow. Take a look at the way my dotfiles are organized. One of the best side-effects of using Stow and symlinked dotfiles is that you can edit dotfiles the same way you do now, and the changes show up in your centralized directory, ready to be committed to version control. How to manage dotfiles using stow (First posted on: 2020-04-20T20:54:14.847231-07:00) Problem. Remove, backup, rename, your original .bashrc (the one that's not in your dotfiles/), because we need that name for Stow. Use GNU Stow for your dotfiles. Stow will now remove the symlink of bashrc, This process is called as unstow-ing. I will … Using Stow and dotfiles. $ cd ~/dotfiles $ stow bash $ stow uzbl $ stow vim And, voila, all your config files (well, symbolic links to them) are all in the correct place, however disorganized that might be, while the actual files are all neatly organized in your dotfiles directory, which is easily turned into a VCS repo. cd into your new dotfiles directory, and run: Instead we leverage the power of symbolic links, aka “symlinks”, by using GNU Stow. In short, stow solves this problem by throwing symlinks where the dotfiles/folders should be found. and all stow commands should be executed in that directory. 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