dotbot VS rcm

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.

Are your per-machine branches mostly distinct, or do they share a lot?

I use https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm and I find my dotfiles share _quite a bit_ in some respects (e.g. neovim config) but are drastically different in others (SSH config as one example) -- keeping things synced _across_ branches sounds very difficult. rcm handles this well, without branches, IMO.

I use https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm, which works smoothly and includes support for host-specific files

I use thoughtbot/rcm to handle my github dotfiles. Super short version after installing, mkdir ~/.dotfiles Then go through your home directory (ie. ~/ ) and mkrc .bashrc and then do the same for any other files you plan on tweaking or have custom settings for. Most of these with be in ~/.config/ but some will be in ~/ . (ie. mkrc ~/.bashrc for your bash settings and aliases)

Prior to catching the Nix brainworms and switching to home-manager, I mostly used thoughtbot/rcm.

Personally I like (and use) rcm. Everything is still in a git repository, but has more features that work well for sharing across multiple machines.

Check out https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

I use rcm. It assumes you keep a separate (potentially version-controlled) folder at ~/.dotfiles or similar, and it provides a suite of tools for managing the symlinks.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

currently I am managing my dotfiles with rcm (ran by ansible). This approach served me well over the years but recently I stumpled over chezmoi.

Setup a Github/Gitlab account and find a dotfile manager you like (I'm using RCM - it can do more than I actually use it for).