I was kind of surprised to see this article on HackerNews, so I thought I’d ask here; how do you handle your dotfiles and do you share them publicly?
My own dotfiles started from those provided by ArcoLinux, with a bunch of changes over the years I had them. Currently installed using Ansible, because that’s more sensible than Bash for this imo.
What do you like about chezmoi vs stow?
Honestly, I was running into the limits of stow. Want to unstow some configs on a bare machine? I hope you wanted that entire directory to be a symlink. Then I saw that someone had actually fixed that many years ago but the maintainer at the time was caught up in some personal crypto related projects and did not appear to be looking at the mailing list.
Chezmoi fixed that, applied a templating engine and added a data mechanism. In moving my stow configs I realized that application specific config file deployments are nice but shouldn’t be necessary. Templates fill that gap, and meshing them with scripts allows you to do some cool things only when variables change.
Plus I was beginning to play around with go at the time, so it just seemed like a good idea to use something I could contribute to if I needed.
I still don’t think I’m using chezmoi to it’s full potential, but I am fairly proud of the script I use to determine data sources for my waybar config on all of my machines.