vincent-margiotta / dotfiles

Simple Dotfile Management

Simple Dotfile Management

Manages my dotfiles in a flexible, straight-forward fashion. The repository consists of my dotfiles and a linker script.

Feel free to copy/fork this repository and any configuration files you find within it. There are no secrets or sensitive data contained within.

Linker Features

• Creates parent directories as required
• Links relative to the $DOTFILES environment variable (default: $HOME)
• Overwrites existing links

Linker Limitations

• Links only regular files
• Links one file per invocation

Linker Usage

To invoke the linker pass it a repository dotfile on the command line:

$ ./link.sh [PATH TO DOTFILE IN REPOSITORY]

The linker creates a symlink to the repository dotfile and will automatically create any parent directories as necessary. Where the dotfile is linked to is based on the repository dotfile's name. Two rules are applied by the linker:

1. Top-level direcory names are ignored
2. All instances of dot- are converted to .

For example, if you have some dotfiles in your repository like

.
├── README.md
├── bash
│   └── dot-bashrc
└── link.sh

1 directory, 3 files

To link your Bash configuration dotfile, run the following:

$ ./link.sh bash/dot-bashrc
Linking bash/dot-bashrc as /Users/vince/.bashrc

Frequently Asked Questions

Why not use [dotbot|GNU stow|any other dotfile manager]?

I've used several dotfiles managers in the past with varying success. Generally, I found them overly complex for my uses.

Can you add support for linking multiple files per invocation?

Yes, but I won't. Currently, the linker script does one thing well and I'd like to keep it that way.

What I've discovered over the years is that the time spent linking my dotfiles is never the bottleneck, but rather the time spent thinking about and experimenting with how I want to configure my system was more important to me.

Other Dotfile Managers

dotbot - A great tool with many features. I used it for years before deciding to switch.

GNU Stow - Another great tool. However, it wasn't made to manage dotfiles. Because of the different versions of GNU Stow out there, I couldn't always manage my dotfiles consistently on every system I'd encountered. This is what lead me to create the simple POSIX shell script to manage my dotfiles in this repository.