It took me 20 years to have an important realization about version controlled dotfiles: what I wanted to do was manage a set of
sensible, personalized, non-standard behaviours for each tool I used, and have a way of distributing those across systems.
What I didn’t need at all, after all, was anything that installed different things on different hosts or classes of hosts.
Luckily, every tool I want to configure has a config file option to include another file, so I have a working copy of my version controlled defaults here:
~/.config/defaults
…and a one time installation script that makes various tool’s config files look like this:
# begin defaults
source ~/.config/defaults/tool.conf
# end defaults
local specific config here
I am quite happy managing the local bits by editing files on local machines. All my configuration stuff splits into either “used everywhere” or “used just on this one host”, so that makes it easier.
As soon as I figured this out I had to pinch myself as to why it had taken so long to come up with this idea.
What I didn’t need at all, after all, was anything that installed different things on different hosts or classes of hosts.
Luckily, every tool I want to configure has a config file option to include another file, so I have a working copy of my version controlled defaults here:
…and a one time installation script that makes various tool’s config files look like this: I am quite happy managing the local bits by editing files on local machines. All my configuration stuff splits into either “used everywhere” or “used just on this one host”, so that makes it easier.As soon as I figured this out I had to pinch myself as to why it had taken so long to come up with this idea.