How I manage my dotfiles

I store all my dotfiles in a dedicated git repository called dotfiles with a remote on GitHub. This allows me to track changes, and clone and pull them to other machines.

I then use stow to create symlinks to place the dotfiles in the appropriate places.

This creates symlinks from for example ~/dotfiles/.zshrc to ~/.zshrc.

stow zsh

I organize them by tool.

dotfiles/
├── zsh/
│   └── .zshrc
├── git/
│   └── .gitconfig
└── README.md

Setup a machine using dotfiles.sh.

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt install git zsh
git clone git@github.com/maxscheijen/dotfiles $HOME/dotfiles
stow git zsh

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