HACKER Q&A
📣 fcoury

What are you using to organize dotfiles / dotconfig files?


I confess it took me a long time to re-organize my dot files and last time I did this was before 2015 I think. Ever since then, I have been using the same solution: just cloning my repo and manually doing some symbolic links here and there based on manual documentation. This was very revolutionary back then :-)

Nowadays it seems like a lot more apps, specially in macOS, are relying on files inside the .config folder, so I ended up created a very simple script to also symlink those but it's still far from ideal.

I have seen a bunch of different tools over the years here in Hacker News that tackle this very problem. But, as always, I keep the habit of saving a lot of bookmarks and when it's time to actually use and search for them, you can't seem to find anything useful.

So this is the question: what are you using today to tackle the problem of keeping your dot files and config files under source control and fast replication and update accross different machines?

Bonus points if it's written in Rust, since it's the language I am currently learning and would be somewhat important to be able to hack the tool as needed and enjoy it too.


  👤 aldonius Accepted Answer ✓
I use rcm. It assumes you keep a separate (potentially version-controlled) folder at ~/.dotfiles or similar, and it provides a suite of tools for managing the symlinks.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm


👤 stop50
Currently dotbare, its an shell wrapper around git