Do you have a bunch of dotfiles? Do you maintain a GitHub repo with all your dotfiles? Whenever you upgrade your machine, do you find yourself manually placing the dotfiles in the right spots in your home directory? If you answered yes to these questions, read on.
Enter GNU Stow
GNU Stow is a dotfile management utility. Stow has all the makings of a varsity athlete:
- Stow is small (a 32KB Perl script).
- Stow is simple to use with a solid manpage.
- Stow doesn’t get in the way of version controlling dotfiles.
Real world Stow usage is pretty simple and best explained with an example. Imagine you had your i3wm and Bash configurations stored in your home directory. The layout might look something like this:
home/
ieg/
.bashrc
.bash_profile
.config/
i3/
config
i3status/
config
To organize the configs into something Stow can work with, make a dotfiles
directory (for example, mydotfiles/) that has a directory per tool you wish to
manage:
home/
ieg/
mydotfiles/
bash/
i3/
Copy the configs of each tool into their corresponding directory. Be sure to copy over the files/directory structure exactly as they appear in your home directory:
home/
ieg/
mydotfiles/
bash/
.bashrc
.bash_profile
i3/
.config/
i3/
config
i3status/
config
Supposed you hopped onto a fresh system with GNU Stow and your mydotfiles/
repo checked out. You can selectively “install” configs using the stow
command. For example to install i3 and Bash configs:
cd mydotfiles/
stow bash
stow i3
It’s that simple. Stow takes care of creating symlinks in your home directory
that point to the concrete files in mydotfiles/! If you want to unlink some
configs, just run stow -D. For example, to unlink Bash configs:
cd mydotfiles/
stow -D bash
Doesn’t get much easier than that.