GNU Stow vs .dotfiles

GNU Stow

GNU Stow - mirror of savannah git repository occasionally with more bleeding-edge branches (by aspiers)

Source Code

gnu.org

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.dotfiles

Personal dotfiles (by josepmdc)

Dotfiles

Source Code

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GNU Stow		.dotfiles
	Project
4	Mentions	2
548	Stars	6
-	Growth	-
9.2	Activity	5.0
20 days ago	Latest Commit	about 1 month ago
Perl	Language	Shell
GNU General Public License v3.0 only	License	-

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

GNU Stow

Posts with mentions or reviews of GNU Stow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-02-12.

GNU Stow is a very useful Perl program but it has some minor issues that need to be fixed
1 project | /r/perl | 24 Oct 2022

I use GNU Stow to symlink many shell and configuration files from a repository. It works so well and there are many webpages out there from people telling you how it's the best way to manage dotfiles.
Is it a good idea to backup my filesystem on github?
3 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 12 Feb 2022

Gnu Stow
Give Your Dotfiles a Home with GNU Stow
1 project | /r/linux | 22 Sep 2021
Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)
17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2020

Too bad that's broken for directory names: https://github.com/aspiers/stow/issues/33

.dotfiles

Posts with mentions or reviews of .dotfiles. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2020-12-26.

[i3] Dark
1 project | /r/unixporn | 31 Dec 2020

dots: https://github.com/josepmdc/dotfiles
Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)
17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2020

https://github.com/josepmdc/dotfiles#2-if-you-want-to-manage...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GNU Stow and .dotfiles you can also consider the following projects:

chezmoi - Manage your dotfiles across multiple diverse machines, securely.

bashdot - Minimalist dotfile management framework.

yadm - Yet Another Dotfiles Manager

zinit - Flexible and fast Zsh plugin manager with clean fpath, reports, completion management, Turbo, annexes, services, packages.

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

vcsh - config manager based on Git

rcm - rc file (dotfile) management

nix - my nix modules, overlays, host configurations, and more!

Ansible - Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.

dot.me - me dot files

dotbot - A tool that bootstraps your dotfiles ⚡️

stowage - Stow-like tool with a backup feature, designed for keeping dotfiles under version control via symlinks