Brandon Invergo

Which seems to be a bit of a genre, actually:

- https://alexpearce.me/2016/02/managing-dotfiles-with-stow/

- https://protesilaos.com/codelog/gnu-stow-dotfiles/

- https://www.baty.net/2018/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/

- http://codys.club/blog/2015/07/07/managing-your-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow/

- https://www.bharatkalluri.in/post/manage-dotfiles-using-stow/

Not to mention these closely-related pages:

- http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html

- https://dotfiles.github.io/

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dotfiles

Seems like it’s a bit of a well-kept secret. I last used it in the early 2000s for Unix system administration, when I wanted to deploy GNU tools on Solaris boxes without blowing away the native Solaris tools. That was … just a bit of time ago.

I do this as well! I have this repo [0] at ~/cfg, then I symlink what I need [1] as an init script. My end goal is to be able to run a single script and get everything [2] set up on a new machine (I change machines somewhat frequently and I got the manual process to under 45 minutes, so there's room for improvement). More on setting up Macs [3].

There is also GNU Stow [4] that does something similar, and probably better.

0: https://github.com/andreis/cfg

1: https://github.com/andreis/cfg/blob/master/init.sh#L64-L69

2: brew and brew cask, dotfiles ofc, and a _lot_ of system settings on mac os can be changed via the CLI, see

3: https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-macOS#setup

4: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html

source control + GNU stow

GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place. For example, /usr/local/bin could contain symlinks to files within /usr/local/stow/emacs/bin, /usr/local/stow/perl/bin etc., and likewise recursively for any other subdirectories such as .../share, .../man, and so on.

https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html

For anyone interested in this topic, [0] contains the best setup I've found for storing dotfiles in a git repo, then linking them with GNU Stow. Steps are just:

git clone https://github.com/me/my-dotfile-repo
cd my-dotfile-repo
stow --target=$HOME zsh
stow --target=$HOME vim
...

Elegant, cross-platform, easy to remember.

[0]: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html