Cstow

About

There's lots of dotfiles managers, but my favorite is GNU Stow.

It has only two problems: boring UI and no config. Cstow solves them.

Name

Constantine's GNU Stow wrapper.

Some GNU Stow Terminology

A target directory is the root of a tree in which one or more packages wish to appear to be installed.

A stow directory is the root of a tree containing separate packages in private subtrees.

Installation

Use pipx

pipx install cstow

Or pip

pip install cstow

Configuration

Set CSTOW_CONFIG_PATH to path/to/your/cstow_config.toml. Use any file name you want.

Examples

• My cstow.toml.
• More examples.

Config Contents

Cstow expands ~ and $AN_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE.

Name	Type	Description	Default
root_dir	String	The root of stow directories	/
cmd_template	String	The template for GNU Stow commands	See below
targets_dirs	Table	Targets (keys) and dirs (values)
targets_dirs (key)	String	A target directory
targets_dirs (value)	Array of strings	Stow directories for the target

root_dir

You might set it to ~/dotfiles or $DOTFILES.

If you don't set root_dir, use absolute paths in targets_dirs.

cmd_template

You can set it to any shell command that contains every placeholder.

Placeholder	Description
action	A GNU Stow action (no, stow, restow, delete)
target	A target directory
dir	A stow directory for the target

Default

stow --$action --no-folding --verbose --target=$target --dir=$dir . \
     2>&1 | grep --invert-match --regexp="^BUG" --regexp="^WARN"

Usage

# Get some help
cstow -h
cstow --help

# Run an action
cstow               # Default action is 'no'
cstow delete        # Action is a positional argument
cstow -a restow     # But flags also work
cstow --action no

# Print plain text
cstow stow --plain
cstow restow -p
cstow -p -a delete