chezmoi VS mackup

> A warning, not an admonishment: Use Apple services in a novel or unsupported manner and you're asking for trouble.

+1

I've always had sync issues with iCloud Drive when storing developer projects and related things there. It ends up stuck or confused or conflicted but tries to resolve the merge conflicts opaquely and it's hard to know there's a problem in real time vs until later when you find something broken. I keep all dev things out of iCloud after getting burned by this enough times over the years.

To OP: Consider a repo dotfiles setup like using Chezmoi or similar. Transitioning to it was less friction than I expected and the only downside really is having to remember to commit changes across devices.

https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi

chezmoi (<https://chezmoi.io> or <https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi>) has a couple dozen txtar tests. They are both amazing and completely frustrating to use, but I don't think that there would be a better way to test most of what chezmoi does without them.

Tom Payne (the creator and primary developer of chezmoi) has added some extra commands to the txtar context which makes things easier for certain classes of testing.

Thanks, I never heard of it before and it looks really interesting.

However, it seems that it does not cover all of my needs: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/1510#discussi...

once i need a more complex solution (eg. for machine specific stuff), i'll probably switch to chezmoi which has more features and native windows support

I’ve been using chezmoi, which uses git, to manage my dot files and have different branches for these types of experiments.

https://chezmoi.io is a dotfile manager that is runs on multiple OSes (including Windows) while handling differences from machine to machine, allows you to store your secrets in your password manager (so you don't have to store secrets in your dotfile repo), and it even supports the NO_COLOR environment variable. Check it out! Disclaimer: I'm the author.

There's a comprehensive list of the most popular dotfile managers at https://dotfiles.github.io/utilities/.

/autoload/ **/autoload//* /plugged/ **/plugged//* */yankring_history.txt ``` Discussion

chezmoi

Checkout yadm or chezmoi. They work great.

Also checkout Mackup.

I am using mackup to sync application preferences between devices over Dropbox. Now if any application with synced preferences is started I will get a question if given application is allowed to access Dropbox files (because it tries to access its preferences). Examples below.

Hello there! I use https://github.com/lra/mackup Not sure if its the BEST but it works well for me. * What does it do - Back ups your application settings in a safe directory (e.g. Dropbox) - Syncs your application settings among all your workstations - Restores your configuration on any fresh install in one command line

Yeah, I went through a similar process when I finally upgraded my MBP after 8 years on a 2013 MBP. In light of the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, I decided to do some spring cleaning with a fresh install. I ended up curating my own setup/bootstrap scripts as well as using mackup to backup and sync my dotfiles and app configs.

I use Mackup which syncs a many app settings including Raycast to your choice of location.

I moved away from using a dotfiles repo a few years ago because I kept forgetting to add/commit files as I changed them.

Instead I use mackup[0] which automatically manages symlinks to your Dropbox/Drive/Share and has support for a huge amount of software by default. You can also manually add “extra” files you wish to track if you like.

[0] https://github.com/lra/mackup

Brew bundle will install fresh copies of your package list. If you have any configuration files that you want to reuse, you’d have to transfer those separately. This might help https://github.com/lra/mackup