walk VS dotfiles_skeleton

Depending on what you want to do, walk may be an option. From the docs:

You can eventually work around walk and sor. Perhaps you will find them more suckless

You can also use my dotfiles skeleton to see, if you have different demands. https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton

Personally it would have helped me to start outright with version tracking and documenting common workflows with dotfiles, for examples starting with my skeleton https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton

Setup dotfiles to quickly restore broken configs. One simple options is https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton

My position is that shells should be as simple as possible and any computations and tooling besides simple arithmetic be externalized: https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton/blob/main/POSIXunsafe

I would recommend for you to start simple and incrementally improve or change plugins you dont like with dotfiles. My relative minimal dotfiles missing JavaScript lsp, debugger etc](https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles).

I dont believe there is "a best way", since requirements for dotfiles differ. For simple replications my [dotfile skeleton](https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton) using fd with ignorefiles worked fine for me.

For easy managing your dotfiles on Linux (did not test Mac) you can usw my dotfiles skeleton.

Guess then you need to minimise the config to track down the issue. Do you use dotfiles? You could use my skeleton to easily branch and reset etc.

Create dotfiles or something different for versioning You can use my https://github.com/matu3ba/dotfiles_skeleton