Ah, dotfile management… Tools like GNU Stow for symlink management and tools like Chezmoi for templating.
Everyone has their own solution, and none of them are for me.
When building my own solution, I valued a few things:
- Use Git.
- Keep things clean. If I don’t need some of my config, there’s no need for it to be on my machine.
- This goes for my scripts as well. I don’t need a screenshotting script on my headless Pi.
- I can share my dotfiles without revealing any private information within them.
- Don’t use templating.
- I want to edit my config files as they exist at their destination.
- I want to immediately see the resulting changes.
My solution? Using Git submodules. Thus, Neodots is born.
This is a submodule- and symlink-based dotfile project.
I discovered Git submodules when I found a project which asked me to clone --recursive.
Submodules, in short, are a way to bring in dependencies as a reference to another git repository.
Read more at the Neodots Wiki.