zQueal / dotfiles

dotfiles managed by GNU Stow

Dotfiles

These are the dotfiles that I use for ArchLabs. Changes are tracked with Git, and hosted here. Everything else is managed with GNU Stow.

How I Did This

1. Install stow
2. Create ~/.dotfiles
3. git init
4. Create folders inside ~/.dotfiles for each dotfile group, git, vim, zsh, etc
5. Move (do not copy--yes, this breaks most things for like 15 seconds) your current dotfiles to the appropriate folders within ~/.dotfiles
6. Run stow; stow vim
7. Stow creates all the syslinks for you
8. Setup your repository where you want it
9. Profit?

How to Use

1. Install stow

2. Clone this/your repo;

   git clone https://github.com/zQueal/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles

3. Run stow vim to symlink all files in ~/.dotfiles/vim to ~

4. Profit?

Issues

If you run into any issues, especially because you may need to delete config files before you stow to avoid conflicts, what I've been doing is adding the files to be removed to a .tar file, deleting, stowing, and then decompressing the archive. This is helpful especially with the .config directory, where there may be files that are not in the repository but are on your local machine. Doing it this way ensures that you get both the files from the repo, and keep the current configuration files you have. Maybe in the future I'll write in a way to automate this.