Long story short. Tried lot of dotfiles managers including custom solutions. All of them have a big disadvantage. You have a copy of a file or symlink. What do we need? Just git. Let’s start!
First of all we need a shell alias to manage our files.
I’m using fish so creating alias looks like this.
$ alias hi "echo hello"
But you can do same thing in bash as well:
$ alias hi="echo hello"
Let’s name our alias dot.
Just add such a line in your shell config file.
Depending on our needs we can:
Allow to backup files on whole disk:
alias dot "git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles --work-tree=/"
Or just in the home directory:
alias dot "git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME"
Great. We’re just made an dot manager!
Let’s init out repo
$ dot init
One more thing! Need to set up one thing:
$ dot config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
And we’re done. All git files are in $HOME/.dotfiles directory.
To add a file or directory we can simply:
$ dot add ~/.config
and commit it with
$ dot commit
The backup is a git repository. We can push it to github for example. Just add remote like on every other git repository.
Just like you saw. There is no copying, linking, just adding a files when something changed.