bashrcd VS dotbot

I moved to splitting my bashrc into multiple files and having my main bashrc source them from a ~/.bashrcd directory.

At heart it's a short snippet that just checks for existence and sources each file in the directory:

https://github.com/targaryen/bashrcd/blob/master/install/ins...

I added aliases to list/edit/remove entries from the .bashrcd directory and resource it. And a script I can call with a one-liner to edit bashrc on a new machine to add the sourcing and the helper aliases.

It'll load alphabetically so I can prefix entries with a number to specify load order (defaulting to 0100 so I don't need to specify this in the commands unless I explicitly changed them).

So the end result is that I can quickly edit or create a new bashrc entry by running 'ebrc entryname'. This opens ~/.bashrcd/0100--entryname in vi, and when it's saved it'll re-source so the add/change takes effect immediately.

Or 'lbrc' to list contents of the directory, or 'rbrc entryname' to remove ~/.bashrcd/0100--entryname

It's fairly simplistic but takes away most of the cognitive load of managing a complex bashrc.

Many command line programs keep their configurations somewhere under $HOME. These are often called "dotfiles".

If you ever use more than one machine, likely you'll want the same configuration available on all those machines.. so you'll want some way to copy them to a new machine.

Some dotfile managers are quite simple, like dotbot. https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

Home Manager from the Nix community is a bit more sophisticated. It allows for writing configurations in the Nix language, which is nice if you know/like Nix. (Nix is a powerful/expressive package manager. Nix is to apt-get what vim is to notepad).

I started using DotBot a couple of years ago and love it. I store my git repo at ~/.dotfiles, and DotBot handles the symlinking and everything

Dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) has worked extremely well for me. It’s simple to setup, has minimal dependencies, and it is also easy to run arbitrary commands if I want to get tricky with things. I would highly recommend it.

You might also like something like https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot. I manage all of the config I care about with this, as part of a repo that also gives me all of the other system setup and customization I expect in my environment.

With dotbot in my GitHub-repository

| for vertical split, - for horizontal split: easy to remember. I have lots of things in my config file, so I don't have an issue with a bit more customization. Installing my .tmux.conf is easy because I use the dotbot dotfile manager.

I use dotbot to manage my dotfiles, which is good for anything I need to install prior to installing plugins (I use vim-plug).

I'm glad you asked! There are plenty of dotfiles managers out there, like chezmoi, Dotbot, or yadm (you can see a list here and a comparison table (from chezmoi, thus biased) here. But for this tutorial (and my dotfiles), I chose dotter.

dotbot is fine.