smithbm2316 / dotfiles

There's no place like ~

dotfiles

# TLDR: here's the command you need to install everything now
stow -vt ~/.config dotfiles

The are my personal configuration files, feel free to steal anything you find interesting! I tend to update them relatively regularly with new apps or settings I add. The most interesting/useful dotfiles I probably have are my neovim config, my various window manager dotfiles (awesomewm, i3, spectrwm, and xmonad folders; I use awesomewm at the moment), and how I actually set up my dotfiles (I use a cli program called gnu stow, but I use it a bit differently than most tutorials online, I'll explain that process below). If you have any questions feel free to open an issue and answer the best that I can!

How I setup and manage these files

My old setup

As I mentioned above, I use a program called gnu stow to set up and manage my dotfiles. However, the way I came around to using it is a bit different than almost every "manage your dotfiles with stow" tutorial that I found on Youtube or in blog posts online. I didn't really like how most people used it, as I had already been managing my dotfiles directly in my XDG_CONFIG_HOME directory (~/.config for me), which was a bit of a mess. You have two options doing that: write a .gitignore that you have to edit every time you install a new program that adds a config directory/files to your XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which would be a nightmare for me with how much I try out new tools and programs. My XDG_CONFIG_HOME gets pretty messy bloated pretty quickly, so that wasn't a good option for me. The second option (and the option I used for months) is to automatically ignore everything in your .gitignore, and then manually edit it every time you have new config files you want to track and keep under version control. This also gets messy, as I had a 71 line long .gitignore. Yuck. I finally switched to a better method recently and am loving it much more now.

My new setup with git + stow

Basically, I now keep this repo cloned to my home directory (~/dotfiles), and use a program called gnu stow to symlink all of the folders in this repo to my XDG_CONFIG_HOME directory. To get my dotfiles installed onto a new machine, all I have to do is git clone https://github.com/smithbm2316/dotfiles ~/dotfiles, and then run stow -v -t ~/.config dotfiles. Since I'm symlinking the folders and not each individual file, what that means is that I can update the files in the appropriate folder in either my ~/dotfiles directory or ~/.config directory, keep my environment variable of XDG_CONFIG_HOME still set to ~/.config, and all the apps on my system treat my dotfiles like they're in the ~/.config folder. Magic! I don't have to continually maintain a super ugly .gitignore file in my ~/.config directory, and to add any new program's dotfiles to my dotfiles repo, all I do is move that folder with mv ~/.config/new-program-to-track ~/dotfiles/new-program-to-track, change directory to my home folder with cd, and re-run stow -v -t ~/.config dotfiles, and I'm done! Stow is smart enough to realize that it already has symlinked the rest of the folders in my dotfiles repo to ~/.config, and it will only symlink the newly added directory. I'm currently working on a Makefile to make this process even easier, and hopefully will have that done soon to make this setup even simpler!