Re:Home in Nix – dotfile management
by devhugo on Friday January 10, 2020 @04:20AM
(#22009611)
That's certainly one option. The unique thing about dotfiles is that everyone has a different 'best solution'. The setup outlined in my post has the advantage of being highly configurable and programmable. However, for some people it might make more sense to use a plain git repo with symlinks as installing Nix on all their devices could be a nonstarter.
I'm curious, what do you use to manage tools that don't have a `source $SOME_PATH` option. Do you symlink?
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Re:Home in Nix – dotfile management
by DarkWiiPlayer on Friday January 10, 2020 @07:14AM
(#22010423)
Generally speaking, I avoid those tools. One example where this happens is rifle; in that case I just have a symlink. Alternatively, one could also just get a standalone C preprocessor and add a git hook to recompile files whenever you commit/pull some new changes.
I used to symlink and have a simple dotfiles repo, but this forces you to have exactly identical rc files. Different computers simply need different setups, so I started with ansible and a few playbooks running locally.
This was posted recently https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/30/dotfiles.html, but I actually liked the idea of using uname, hostname etc in constructing $PATH and even though I was already using git to track my dotfiles I adapted some parts of my setup like Drew describes and made $HOME a git repo itself ignoring everything by default. Works quite well across different OSs, machines and shells.