Dotfiles
What are dotfiles?
There are a number of important programs like your terminal, emacs, and vim which are configured by files starting with a dot (.zshrc
) in your home directory.
How to manage dotfiles
Instead of editing your dotfiles in your home directory, I recommend creating a git repo and symlinking the files into your home directory. I create a .dotfiles
folder in my home directory and use GNU stow
to symlink the files in my home directory.
GNU stow
GNU stow is strictly a symlink manager. It has a folder structure convention that allows you to create symlinks in the folder above it. If I run stow
it will create symlinks in the directory above where stow
was run.
/Users/bsunter/.dotfiles
├── .gitmodules
├── Brewfile
├── README.md
├── emacs
│ ├── .emacs.d
│ └── .spacemacs
├── git
│ └── .gitconfig
├── iterm
│ └── ItermProfile.json
├── macos
│ └── bootstrap.sh
├── manage.sh
├── vim
│ └── .vimrc
└── zsh
├── .stow-local-ignore
├── .zshrc
└── lib