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How do you manage your dotfiles?
(programming.dev)
A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.
Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.
For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:
https://www.chezmoi.io/ if you've got some complexity with your setup. otherwise, could be overkill.
Had a homebrew Git setup for ages and recently started using Chezmoi. It's only been a few weeks, but so far it's been pretty great!
What I really like about chezmoi is how it can retrieve secrets stored on Bitwarden. Your git history is clean of secrets but you can have them referenced on your dotfiles.
I use Chezmoi but I have to point out some of its downfalls vs. other dotfile managers, particularly if someone is looking to migrate to it.
chezmoi remove ...
. You can't justrm
them from your dotfiles directory, because chezmoi does not sync state; it simply applies what's currently in your repo.Despite these gripes I still use it because deployment via a single binary is convenient, and there's enough control through the generated config file + system info to handle multiple kinds of deployments sort-of-sensibly (see point 4 above).
I adore chezmoi
it's so useful! I used to have some terrible setup going with branches for different OSes in my dotfiles, and chezmoi really simplified the whole thing
Indeed, I use my dotfiles across several machines, architectures, and distributions and it's fantastic