Now that 20225 has become “The Year of the Terminal”(R), I have been looking at how managing my dot files in a more coherent way. I was thinking straight up git vs stow, but I should would be very interested in comparisons from those who have used this tool.
I haven't looked at this one yet, but until someone compares it to Chezmoi and points out where it's better I'm not even looking attention I fear. Chezmoi is just that good.
For the sake of answering the parent question with regard to Chezmoi specifically: Chezmoi is a very comprehensive dotfiles manager. It can do a lot of things. More than any other I'm aware of.
More does not necessarily equal better, though. I think that's a matter of personal preference. I tried Chezmoi for a while and ultimately decided it was just a lot more levers at my disposal than I really wanted to even think about.
Dotter, by contrast, is a lot more minimal. Dotter is little more than a symlink manager plus templating engine plus config files to declare what machines need what config.
Chezmoi is all that, and does a lot more: encryption/decryption (even has password manager integrations), automatic push/pull. It's also designed so that you can add or manage files regardless of what your current working directory is (via commands like `chezmoi edit/add`).
In my case, after deciding I wanted to go for the minimal end of things, I almost went for GNU Stow however, I wanted templating functionality and I liked dotter's "packages" system for defining what files a given computer needs.
And very much a personal bias here: I found the learning curve of Chezmoi templates not great. I'm also not a big fan of the fact that Chezmoi relies on you naming your source files in particular ways in order to determine what the target file permissions should be.
Chezmoi manages stuff that's in my /home - configurations, scripts in ~/bin/ etc. It also installs a bunch of applications with a runonce_ -script both on Linux and MacOS.
Ansible makes sure the correct system-level packages are installed, things in /etc/ are set up the way I like etc. There's a bunch of overlap with the packages installed by ansible and Chezmoi - but I run `chezmoi update` multiple times a week an I can run it on any computer I'm on. Ansible is for Big Things.
Then I have an opentofu setup that manages a bunch of docker containers, keeping them as stateful as possible.
For daily simple things, I can just edit any config file, add it to chezmoi and push it to git. Then on any machine I can `chezmoi update` and everything is synced.
For example in my dotfiles repo I'll have `etc/pacman.d/01-options.conf` and the dotfiles install script will symlink that to `/etc/pacman.d/01-options.conf`. This way the source of truth is always in a single dotfiles repo.
This strategy has worked well for dotfiles I use on Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. It includes support for WSL 2 too. The install script has been working with this set up for years to run 1 single command and have everything work where work in this case is installing and configuring a bunch of tools I use. An example is here https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.
I found it quite useful. My main use case for it is managing the same dotfiles for Windows and Linux. Specifically that neovim uses different folders and I can set that per OS in dotter.
It also allows for including our not including a config based on an executable being available which can be useful.
It requires some configuration, depending on how many of its features you use but I think it's worth it.
If all you want is GNU Stow with a bit nicer UX, I wrote and have been using https://github.com/bbkane/fling for a few years now. See the demo gif in the README for the UX
I was using "just git" until I realized I've started writing a whole bunch of scripts of various types to recreate ("ad-hoc, informally specified and bug-ridden...") functionality that chezmoi offers out of the box and has already tested in the field.
