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How do you manage your dotfiles?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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I don't understand what to manage about dotfiles. You mean backups?
It doesn't have to be a big baroque thing. When there's a dotfile I configure regularly, I move it to a Git repo and use
stowto put it "back" into place with a symlink. On new machines, it isn't long before I try something that doesn't work or see the default shell prompt and go "oh yeah, I want my dotfiles", check out the repo, run a script that initializes a few things (some stuff is machine-specific so the script makes files for that stuff with helpful comments for me to remember the differences between login shells or whatever) and then I'm off to the races.So its more a general question how to backup (with versioning) these files. I just always wondered what "manage" in this context meant. I don't handle them differently than any other file to backup.