I use a Github repo + gnu stow. I wrote a little post about it (http://juanda.me/managing-your-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow). Notice that I've made my dotfiles repo private since then so you can't check it out, but the post still draws the general idea.

+1 for this method! Good post. I originally learned about this through: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...

Mine are on github. If you want to use this setup simply copy and paste the contents of your original files and use the `makesymlinks.sh` script to create the links. It takes me 30 seconds to setup a new computer with it.

https://github.com/garyharan/dotfiles

That's the post that inspired me to start cloning my config files from GitHub.

I was searching for this earlier, I came across a HN post which someone from Atlassian write up really nicely: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/02/best-way-to-sto...

No extra tools (just git), no symlinks.

I have different needs in my dotfiles for different contexts, so I've created a system where each file is represented by a folder, which contains separate file snippets for each context.

So in my vimrc folder, I've got a work file, a school file, a home file, and a base file (which applies everywhere). Then I have a bash script that stitches all the relevant chunks together into a cohesive file for a given location. It can even do sub-locations by adding underscores to the name. E.g. 'work_nas' will produce a file consisting of the base, work and work_nas files, concatenated together.

This all sits in a private git repo, and I just manually copy the output files to wherever they belong whenever there's an update to them. I've been thinking for a while about writing a script to copy them into place, but GNU stow looks pretty interesting.

I use a Github repo, but I actually store it on Dropbox. I then symlink everything into place on a new computer.

Any change I make to a dotfile then shows up on any other machines.

http://github.com/napcs/dotfiles/

Stow is probably the simplest way to do it. The only weird thing is the directory structure I have with `.` prefixes in order to be linked as I want them inside my home.

Besides that, I don't see how a better way to do it.

I store them in a dotfiles repo that gets pushed to Github occasionally. They get symlinked to my home directory, and I use thoughtbot's rcm[0] tool for managing that. Then I just use a small script that I keep updated to handle installation and setup on a fresh computer. I'll need to take a look at gnu stow now. It seems like it'd be a slightly simpler alternative, and would keep my dotfiles folder a bit better organized.

0. https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

I use vcsh:

https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

I have separate repos for SSH, Bash, VIM, and other stuff (like .inputrc).

I do exactly this myself, and it works remarkably well. I had a few conflicts I had to work around between different packages, but the updated vim package directory structure has mostly solved that problem.

EDIT: The biggest problem, for me, is that since they are all dotfiles, they are invisible to normal ls operations within the stow directory. It's a minor nit, but it can be quite annoying to run up against.

I've aliased ls to `alias ls='ls -GFhal'` to get around hidden dotfiles.

I store my configs in a git repo on Seafile/Syncwerk (Dropbox alternative). This gives me a seamless experience on Unix, OSX and Windows where I just have to link to them from my home directory when on a new computer.

Yes, it took an initial investment but now it just works everywhere and maintenance is low.

(Some people say git repos in clouds sync are bad, but I have had zero problems with them over the years.)

Its just bad because the .git folder means that any time you delete an old git repo or anything, you get a fevered email from dropbox reminding you that you just deleted 10000 files.