Experienced Devs

3961 readers

3 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

jmk1ng@programming.dev

drewsiferr@programming.dev

How do you manage your dotfiles? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by no_sle3p@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm wondering if there is a new tool out there that I'm missing out on.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] gamma@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I've done symlinks into a separate directory before, but by far my favorite method is to just let ~ be a git repo. It's maximally simple, no other tooling needed besides git.

There are a few key steps to making this work well:

echo '*' > ~/.gitignore: This way git status isn't full of untracked files. I can still git add -f what I actually want to track.
git branch -m dots: For clarity in my shell prompt.
[ -d "$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin" ] && PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/$(hostname)/bin and similar if there's config I want to apply only to certain hosts.

[–] drdnl@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty happy with nixos these days, after the initial (crazy) learning curve. But I really like the creative simplicity of this idea

[–] gamma@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

~~Stole~~ Forked this idea from Drew Devault.

I'm looking at NixOS now for my server, and while I understand the host config, I'm curious whether I could integrate this into my config in some way.