The place for all of my personal dotfiles - where I develop, test, and keep all of my configs to quickly and easily get my environment up and running!
I use stow to manage my dotfiles as I find it's much easier for me to understand what I'm actually doing and vizualize the process, pick and choose what I want (ex. vim vs. nvim) for certain situaltions, and manage my configs for different OSs in my own way without dealing with a script. It may more work than just relying on a script... but I really like to understand what's going on and not obscure it away. There are definitely ways to get all of this into a script - and I will probably do that someday - but for now, manually stowing things is just fine.
First step is to clone this repo to your system's home directory. This is super important because by default stow will put symlinks one directory above where it is run (i.e. its parent directory). I am going to document the full stow command to make sure things are unambiguous but if you run the default commands we want to make sure this still runs.
git clone <this repo> ~
and you're done! The next step is to stow whatever is needed.
Navigate into the dotfiles directory with cd ~/dotfiles
It's a good idea to test the stow first to make sure we've set everything up correctly. To do that we can use the -n flag to designate "no" and the -v flag to set "verbose." This will tell us what we're about to do. We will also explicity tell stow where to stow the symlinks using the -t flag. The one "non-explicit" flag I'm going to use is the -S flag which is the default "stow" action, to unstow you can use the -D flag which I will use later.
stow -nvt ~ <directory with contents you want to stow>
I reccomend doing this testing before every stow, it will tell you exactly what it's diong and let you know if there are any issues.
I reccomend making backups of any files it would overwrite/adopt, for example:
mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak
Just in case things go wrong.
Once your tests give you the results you're looking for, you can go ahead and stow your desired configs using:
stow -vt ~ <directory with contents you want to stow>
Just take out the -n flag to actually do it.
To unlink/unstow your files you can use the -D flag
stow -vDt ~ <directory with contents you want to stow>