EDIT: Also on stow - I tried it a couple times and it never seemed flexible enough. Can it handle things like keeping ~/.config/nvim and ~/.vim in the same stow directory? (And for that matter, can it link them together? I like having the same config for vim and neovim)
Then when you run `stow vim` from the parent of the original 'vim' folder it will symlink everything in there to ~.
You can even have more folders that have a '.config/foobar' inside of them, and when you stow those it will all work itself out nicely!
Edit: You can find examples of this in my dotfiles https://github.com/AnthonyWharton/dotfiles/ (I use stow if you didn't guess :P). For example look at the 'i3' folder and the 'polybar' folder, they both add things to '~/.config '
Although yours is more sound, I'm just moving files to `*.old`.
EDIT: Some quirks to note, especially if you want to steal this script: 1. I use ~/.local/etc as my dotfile directory. 2. I support multiple shells but have all of them use ~/.profile rather than shell-specific files (most config overlaps, and there's a case stmt that deals with per-shell settings). 3. The vim/neovim bit at the bottom will fail silently if the directory already exists; thankfully this is rare, but it should be fixed some time.