In the UNIX world, programs are configured in a couple different ways:
- shell arguments that are passed when you start a program
- shell scripts containing both commands and their args (like
.bashrc) - application-specific text configuration files (like INI, JSON, or YAML files)
Programs with many options (like window managers or text editors) are configured on a per-user basis with files in your home directory (~). In a UNIX-like OS, any file or directory with a name that starts with a period (.) is considered hidden, and in a default view will not be displayed. Thus the name "dotfiles".
It's been said of every console user:
you are your dotfiles.
Since they dictate how your system will look and function, these files are very important, and need to be backed up, versioned, and shared. Git is quite good at all 3 of these things. However, keeping a git repo in the root of your home directory is a bad idea because everything below your home directory is considered a part of that repo. The solution is to use GNU Stow, a free, portable, lightweight symlink farm manager. This allows you to keep a git repo of all your config files that are symlinked into place via a single command. This makes sharing these files among multiple systems super simple. and does not clutter your home directory with version control files.
Stow is available for all GNU/Linux distros and most UNIX-like OSes via your package manager.
sudo pacman -S stowsudo apt-get install stowbrew install stow
Or you can clone it from source and build it yourself.
By default, the stow command will create symlinks for files in the parent directory of where you execute the command. This dotfiles setup makes no assumptions about where the repo is located, and runs all the stow commands with install.sh.
To install the configs, clone this repo to the location of your choice, cd into the repo directory, and run ./install.sh. This will run a series of stow commands to symlink all the config files in this repo to where they belong in your home directory.
If you don't want to install a particular set of config files, remove the corresponding line in install.sh and that directory will be omitted. For example, if you don't use Neovim you would remove the line stow --target ~/.config nvim.
Note: Stow can only create a symlink if a config file does not already exist. If a default file was created upon program installation you must delete it first before you can install a new one with stow. This does not apply to directories, only files.
I setup my home directories a little different from the default, because I have to type them often and I don't like to hit the shift key or type extra letters. The names I use are:
- document (tax stuff, scanned recepts & contracts)
- download
- irclogs (logs from irssi)
- junk (a pile of crap to be sorted through, usually called "Desktop")
- music
- picture
- proj (for git repos / programming projects)
- video
I store all my documents on a separate partition (mounted at /data) backed by some cheap HDDs and BTRFS software RAID, rather than the SSD that holds the rest of my Arch installation (mounted at /). Everything on the SSD is data that I can get by downloading an Arch ISO, a couple hundred packages, and cloning some git repos. None of it is backed up, mirrored in RAID, or snapshotted, since it's all publicly available on the internet and would be a waste of space & CPU-time to keep copies of. However, the /data partition is snapshotted regularly with snapper, backed up, and mirrored with RAID 1+0, because it's stuff that I don't want to lose.
I also have ~/proj as a small BTRFS partition on an SSD, since it only holds git repos. I don't do any snapshotting or backups on this because all the git repos I have are synced to GitHub and/or GitLab. When the SSD that holds the partition fails, the only thing I will lose is uncommitted work, and I rarely have much of that. The use of BTRFS here is just so I can do file deduplication... With all the npm projects I work on, I have thousands of duplicated files in node_modules directories, which would add up to a few extra GB if they weren't deduplicated.