Basic Usage

This repository uses GNU stow to manage dotfiles and other configuration files. To populate ~/.vimrc, ~/.bashrc, and various files in the ~/.config/*/ directories, you clone this repository in your home directory and run stow like so:

stow --dotfiles vim
stow --dotfiles bash
stow --dotfiles alacritty

This takes advantage of the fact that stow's default target directory is the parent of the current working directory. The --dotfiles flag tells stow to treat source files with the name dot-* in a special way: instead of creating a symbolic link in the target directory with the same name as the source file, stow will first replace the dot- prefix with a literal .. For example, dot-vimrc will be pointed to by .vimrc.

To stow files in other directories, you can provide stow with an explicit target directory, e.g.:

stow --target /home/other-user/ vim

This will create a symbolic link from /home/other-user/dot-vimrc to vim/dot-vimrc.

You can always check stow's man pages for more details.

Bootstrap

This repository will also contain a bootstrap script that will stow the most commonly used dotfiles and print a list of the remaining packages to be stowed.