Dotfiles Management: Your Dev Environment as Code
New machine? Reinstall? Your perfect dev environment should be one command away. Here’s how to manage dotfiles properly. The Problem You spend hours configuring: Shell (zsh, bash) Editor (vim, nvim, VS Code) Git config SSH config Tmux Aliases and functions Then you get a new laptop and do it all again. Badly. The Basic Solution Put dotfiles in a Git repo, symlink them. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 # Create repo mkdir ~/dotfiles cd ~/dotfiles git init # Move configs mv ~/.zshrc ~/dotfiles/zshrc mv ~/.vimrc ~/dotfiles/vimrc mv ~/.gitconfig ~/dotfiles/gitconfig # Create symlinks ln -sf ~/dotfiles/zshrc ~/.zshrc ln -sf ~/dotfiles/vimrc ~/.vimrc ln -sf ~/dotfiles/gitconfig ~/.gitconfig # Push to GitHub git remote add origin git@github.com:username/dotfiles.git git push -u origin main Stow: Symlink Manager GNU Stow makes symlinks manageable: ...