This cookbook presents an approach to manage your filelist in such a way to make your dotfiles management convenient and well-organized. There is obviously many other ways to manage your filelist but this is my personal favourite as it makes it easy to add or remove a group of dotfiles for a host and it still provides a lot of flexibility.
The main idea is to define groups that match your hostnames and choose categories that groups similar dotfiles (for example a "vim" or "tmux" category).
An example filelist that follows this approach would look something like this:
# group names matches the hosts you manage laptop=vim,tmux,x,tools desktop=vim,tmux,x # vim category .vimrc:vim # tmux category .tmux.conf:tmux # x category .xinitrc:x .Xresources:x # tools category .bin/hack_nsa.sh:tools .bin/change_btc_price.sh:tools # these files are managed manually per-host .inputrc:laptop .inputrc:desktop
This way you can easily add or remove a group of dotfiles for a host by simply editing their group. And since the group name matches your hostname you don't need to manually specify any categories when running dotgit commands (have a look at the :doc:`usage` section to see why).