dotbot VS chezmoi

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.

> 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.