dotbot VS vcsh

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.

I'm pretty happy with vcsh. I've used a lot of options over the years, and this is the only one I've never been motivated to replace.

weirdly, nobody mentioned vcsh[1] yet. it's a git-based tool that gives all git goodies. I use it and a couple of bash micro scripts to pull/push the latest changes upon logging in/out into shell (again bash, but seeking for POSIX or fish-based version)

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

I feel obligated to point out vcsh [1], which is likely already packaged for your operating system.

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

The main selling point is that you can set up various git repos for different things. I have one for SSH keys (and no, that does not get pushed anywhere except to my own private server), VIM, neovim, bash, and 'other' (for misc config files like .dir_colors, .gitconfig, etc.).

All you need is https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

I'm using vcsh which is basically a small wrapper around git. The resulting repository is this in my case.

It’s over-engineered, but I’ve been using https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh for this for years.