this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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How do you manage your dotfiles? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by no_sle3p@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
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I'm wondering if there is a new tool out there that I'm missing out on.

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[–] kuresov@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I use Chezmoi but I have to point out some of its downfalls vs. other dotfile managers, particularly if someone is looking to migrate to it.

  • Go's templating lib is incredibly unergonomic.
  • Identifying file perms and visibility in by special naming convention is pretty gross. Also makes it more difficult to migrate to another solution.
  • If you're deleting files, you need to remember to do it through chezmoi remove .... You can't just rm them from your dotfiles directory, because chezmoi does not sync state; it simply applies what's currently in your repo.
  • Handling multiple systems through .chezmoiignore ends up being overly verbose and unintuitive vs. the approach used by other dotfile managers

Despite these gripes I still use it because deployment via a single binary is convenient, and there's enough control through the generated config file + system info to handle multiple kinds of deployments sort-of-sensibly (see point 4 above).