Paul's Dotfiles

GNU Stow

I use GNU's stow utility to maintain symlinks between the config files and directories in this repo and their expected locations within my home directory. Read this post to see more details about how stow can manage your dotfiles, but essentially it creates symlinks as-needed at the appropriate levels.

For example, if you have a structure that looks like this:

zsh
├── .config
│   ├── zsh-stuff
│   └── ...
├── .zsh
│   ├── lib
│   ├── plugins
│   └── themes
└── .zshrc

When I do stow zsh, the stow utility will descend into the zsh directory, and for each level, attempt to create a symlink:

/home/rando/.zshrc  -> Code/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc
/home/rando/.zsh    -> Code/dotfiles/zsh/.zsh/
/home/rando/.config -> Code/dotfiles/zsh/.config/

When it gets to .config, since that folder already exists, it will descend one level deeper, and repeat the process:

/home/rando/.config/zsh-stuff -> ../Code/dotfiles/base16-shell/.config/zsh-stuff/

Since it creates symlinks for directories as high as possible, this means you can create configs where the app expects them, and they'll show up in the git repo as unstaged files.

For example, if I added a new script in ~/.config/zsh-stuff/do-cool-shit.sh, if cd into the git repository I'll see the changed files:

## master...origin/master [ahead 1]
 M zsh/.zshrc
?? zsh/config/zsh-stuff/do-cool-shit.sh

Usage:

Clone this project somewhere, I keep mine in ~/Code/dotfiles. Then, use the stow command to create symlinks for each project into the appropriate places in your homedir:

$ git clone https://github.com/paul/dotfiles.git Code/dotfiles
$ cd Code/dotfiles
$ stow zsh

To "uninstall" and delete all the symlinks created by stow, pass the -D argument:

stow -D zsh

To change where stow will create the symlinks ($HOME by default) or otherwise configure stow itself, use the .stowrc file