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

• Programming