Managing dotfiles with chezmoi | Daniel Stoddart
Over the past five years or so, I’ve realised the benefits and power of keeping the most important and configured dotfiles on my system under version control.
Simply put, managing your dotfiles with version control keeps historical versions of your configuration files so that if something goes wrong or you accidentally overwrite a crucial setting, you can easily and trivially revert to a previous state of the file.
Version controlling your dotfiles adds a layer of robustness and flexibility to managing your system configuration. Dotfile management gives you the combined benefit of a consistent environment everywhere with an undo command and a restore from backup.
In the past, to achieve this I had tried several methods. The first time, I used an install script. This method was somewhat awkward because it creates symlinks and you need to follow up and edit file permissions. Ugh.
That setup didn’t last long. I remembered GNU stow and decided that it might be a solution, since Stow is cross-platform and has very simple git integration. However, after using Stow to manage my dotfiles for a few years, I experienced the shortcomings:
