yadm VS rcm

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.

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).