Dotfiles

After reading The best way to store your dotfiles: A bare Git repository - Atlassian, I decided it was the good solution to manage my dotfiles between my machines...

This is part of the dotfiles bare repos (stored in $HOME/dotfiles).

How it works ?

There is a bare Git repository called dotfiles (bare means it's not the normal type of repos). The files are not stored inside the folder dotfiles when we clone it (it contains what .git contains normally). Versionned files are stored in the $HOME directory (meaning /home/sam where sam is the username).

A visual example: /home/sam Documents Desktop ... .bashrc .kdenliverc

Side note: Github Desktop doesn't support bare repository

How to use

Use these files on a new Fedora 36 machine

todo

Add new files to versionning

config add /path/to/file

How to commit changes ?

config commit -m "Update .kdenliverc"

A way to commit all tracked files without adding them one by one:

config commit -a -m "Update .kdenliverc"

Final push:

config push

How to manage variants depending on different machines

Let's say my machine A wants all my defaults and my machine B want the defaults but with a little change in a given config file...

Just use branches ! Let's define that main is the base for every machine I use. Now, we can create another branch called fedoralaptop where do merge from main into fedoralaptop to update the default, but keep some variants.

Special files

For ex. .config/kwriterc is untracked locally because a few useless lines changes all the times. See more on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6557467/can-git-ignore-a-specific-line

The command for this is git update-index --assume-unchanged .config/kwriterc to ignore modifications in the file. To disable this we can run git update-index --no-assume-unchanged .config/kwriterc.

Files managed in this repository

VSCodium

• VSCodium settings.json file: .var/app/com.vscodium.codium/config/VSCodium/User/settings.json

• VSCodium keyb.json file:

• ...