Use Stow for Your Dotfiles. Please. #

Ever since I took an interest in dotfiles (I’m looking at you emacs & awesome wm) and their magical ability to configure applications and tweak each little setting to my liking, I’ve been hooked. I spend more time configuring these tools than using them, in the true developer way.

However, I always ran into one issue: I have multiple drives for different distros (and a consistent ability to break my machine) and have never found a great way to manage my config files.

I always had slightly different configs based on the machine I was on, due to the nature of tweaking as I go. Well, not anymore! Stow is incredible. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s made my life much easier.

Well, What is Stow? #

Stow is a powerful symlink farm manager that simplifies the task of managing and deploying software packages, especially useful for handling dotfiles across multiple machines.

As described by themselves:

It takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem and makes them appear to be installed in the same place.

Essentially, you can control any file in your home directory, including dotfiles, from within one directory. Think of all the clutter you remove! You can just focus on the files you want to maintain and move around.

For example My dotfiles repo is just my zshrc, alacritty, tmux & neovim configs, as an editors note here feel free to send me neovim configs / plugin recommendations as I’m updating mine currently.

I use these on 3 different machines though, I don’t care about moving anything else over other than those configs. This allows me to remove the overhead of everything else in your .config which comes with your system of choice.

Couple this with using Git to store all of your config files, and you can easily manage them all in one repository/directory. It’s bliss.

So, let’s get into setting it up!

Guide #

Step 1: Git and Stow #

First things first: make sure you’ve got Git and Stow installed. Installing Stow is as easy as whispering sweet nothings into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install stow # For Debian/Ubuntu
brew install stow # For the macOS crowd, I believe

And Git, well, if you haven’t got Git, I’m surprised you found this article.

Step 2: Quick Setup #

Kick things off by creating a dedicated Git repository for your dotfiles.

mkdir ~/dotfiles
cd ~/dotfiles 
git init

Think of this new folder as your home directory, so you want to replicate its structure within the folder.

If you have your Alacritty config at

~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml

then it should be the same, i.e.

~/dotfiles/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml.

Step 3: Stow Away Your Treasures #

While there are other methods, I found the easiest way was to move the configs I needed using something like mv to my dotfiles repository and then using stow .. This command sym-links your files back to their original locations in your dotfiles repository.

Step 4: Commit to Git! #

Now they’re all being managed in a non-hidden directory. Cool, but you don’t get the full benefit of this until you add Git into the mix. Pushing them to a remote repository means that no matter where you are, or how many times you’ve reinvented your machine, your personalised setup is just a few commands away.

git add .
git commit -m "Behold, my dotfiles!"
git remote add origin <remote-repository-url>
git push -u origin master

Now, if you make a change in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml, then when you go back to your dotfiles repo, you will see (with a good ole git status) that you can commit and manage those files with version control. This also lets you pull in any config changes from other machines at any time or revert your changes after breaking them!

Conclusion #

I love Stow, and in tandem with Git, this is my preffered toolkit for managing dotfiles across multiple machines and systems. It provides a straightforward, reliable method to ensure your environment is always just the way you like it, no matter where you find yourself.

It’s easy, and it works. What more can you ask for?

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed!

Want to know more? #

• Incredible video & aeshtetically pleasing video by Dreams of Autonomoy
• Stows Website previously linked
• Article I found searching for memes on dotfiles