dotbot VS yadm

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.

Everyone hand-rolls their own dotfile management system, but YADM already does everything you need:

https://yadm.io/

I've been working around this using tools built on top of git like [yadm](https://github.com/TheLocehiliosan/yadm) and relying on `ls-files` to list all my tracked dotfiles and their paths.

Still having everything in one place would make things much simpler. Great idea!

I wonder if the program i use to manage my dotfiles could help manage your scripts and extend your setup to all your desktops? Its called yadm (https://yadm.io/) it makes it so easy to have a laptop and a desktop or two.

I really like that one but still prefer yadm because you can just edit your files as usual and then yadm add them wherever you are.

If you haven’t already, this is the time to install a tool like yadm and get your computer configuration into version control. Your command-line tools can be managed by yadm directly, your system settings can mostly be managed with a yadm bootstrap script that runs things like defaults write, and the software you install can be managed with a Brewfile that the yadm bootstrap script uses to install software with Homebrew. Don’t manually download Xcode, use xcodes to do it.

I personally use YADM. It's basically a git repo on my home folder, that only tracks what I explicitly set. And you can setup bootstraps to do what you said, install a bunch of stuff or make custom changes. In it's essence, it's a set of bash/sh files that are executed sequentially when you launch the yadm bootstrap command.