What's Your Go-To Way to Manage Dotfiles?

Dotfiles are one of those things you don’t think much about until you’re setting up a new machine and realize your whole workflow lives in a handful of config files scattered across your home directory. I’ve gone through the “just copy them manually” phase, a brief stint with a bare git repo, and now I’m leaning on a simple symlink setup that actually travels well between machines.

Whether you’re using something like GNU Stow, a dedicated tool like chezmoi, or just a git repo you wing it with, I’m curious how you’re managing yours and whether it’s actually held up over time?


Been using a bare git repo approach for a while and it works well enough, but chezmoi has been tempting me lately mostly for the templating support across machines with different setups. The manual copy method works until it really doesn’t, usually at the worst possible time.

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I backup all dotfiles - thats it. No git anymore, no extra tool, just backup.

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Backup locally you mean? In home/ dir or a different machine or location?

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Locally (USB drive) + different machine

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all the dotfiles are included in my nightly backup

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