rikp777 / .dotfiles

About GNU STOW

GNU Stow describes itself as a "symlink farm manager", but in practical tems it's just a program that can mirror the structure of one directory into another by creating symbolic links back to the original files.

This is extremely useful when you have a directory full of configuration files that is managed by Git and you want to send all of those configuration files to where they belong in you home directory.

Basic usage

Let's say we've got our configuration files stored in a directory under the home directory called .dotfiles. We can easily create symbolic links to the files in this directory to the equivalent locations in the home directory using the following command: stow . Before we run that, let take a look at what's already in the .dotfiles directory and the home directory: ls -al ~ ls -al ~/.dotfiles now let's run the stow command that mentioned before

cd ~/.dotfiles
stow .
ls -al ~

we can now see that all of the configurations files under ~/.dotfiles, even those in child directories, have had symbolic links created!

How it works

GNU Stow walks the file and directory hiearchy of the directory passes as the first parameter to the stow command and creates symbolic links to those files in the equivalent locations in the target directory.

The important thing to be aware of here is that our dotifles directory must have the same layout as where the files would be placed under the home directory. this means you will need to have the equivalent subdirectory structure in you dotfiles folder so that all symbolic links get created in the right place.

On thing you may have notices: we didn't specify that the target directory is! By default, stow assumes that the target directory is the parent directory of the one that you specified.

this means that stow . is equivalent to:

stow --dir=~/.dotfiles --target=~/

#OR

stow -d ~/.dotfiles -t ~/

This means that you have full control over the source and target directories that Stow uses!

Ignoring files and directories

By default, GNU Stow does a good job of inforing common files and directories you might not want to be linked back to your home directory like README AND LICENSE files, source control folders.

Let's say you have other files in your dotfiles folder that you don't want to have linked to you home directory. For example, our dotfiles folder has a Notes.org file. That really doesn't need to be in you home folder.

To skip files like this, we can create a file in our dotfiles folder called .stow-local-ignore. Each line of this file should be a string or regular expression representing any file or directory you don't want to link to your home folder.

Example

\.git
misc
# License 
^/.*\.org

this will avoid linking the .git folder, a folder called misc, the LICENSE file, and any files ending in .org, the latter being useful for you if you use Emacs and Org Mode to keep literate configuration files.