Homer

Dotfile management with git from inside Emacs.

Installable with straight.el, use-package, and the following snippet of code:

(use-package homer
  :demand t
  :straight (homer :type git :host github :repo "joshuaharry/homer"))

Feedback welcome.

Motivation

One useful way to track dotfiles involves keeping a git bare repository. This Emacs package builds upon this technique to make tracking these files using Emacs as easy as possible. The workflow here is as follows:

0. Create a remote repository to host your dotfiles on somewhere like GitHub or GitLab.

1. Run M-x homeinit to initialize homer. This will create a git bare repository in your home directory and initialize some files needed for homer to work.

Invoking homeinit will create a file called dotfiles.dots inside the directory ~/.config/homer/, although you can change the path by editing the special variable *homer-dotfile-path* as you wish. The file dotfiles.dots describes the files you would like to track. It is structured as follows:

# This is a comment.
~/.config/emacs/init.el
~/.zshrc

# Blank lines are completely ok.

~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

The ~ will be expanded into your home directory, just like in a shell.

By default, homer will warn you if you have entries in your dotfiles file that don't exist. You can silence the warning (and, indeed, all other non-error messages homer emits) by setting the variable *homer-silent-output* to t.

2. Run homeadd at any point to stage changes to your dotfiles.

3. Run homepush to commit those changes and push them to the remote repository you configured initially.

On a day-to-day basis, you'll probably be running homeadd and homepush all the time; you will only invoke homeinit once per machine you use.

4. If you need to want to adjust the dotfiles you track, run M-x homefix, which opens the file at *homer-dotfile-path* for editing.

Testing

Install eldev and run:

eldev test

From inside this directory.