I use stow to manage my configuration files.

Quick setup and basic workflow:

Clone the repository to ~/.dotfiles.

git clone https://github.com/Maaxxs/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles/

Then use stow to symlink files and directories of a package (=folder in this repository) to their correct location.

For instance, stow the files for the package editor.

stow editor

How does this work? stow uses the parent directory of this repository as target directory by default. It then creates symlinks for files and folders inside the package (e.g. editor) at the corresponding location relative to the parent directory.

Example:

$ cd ~/.dotfiles
$ tree -a editor
editor
├── .config
│   ├── alacritty
│   │   └── alacritty.yml
│   └── nvim
...
└── .vimrc

Basically, you can replace the word editor above with $HOME as this is the parent directory of ~/.dotfiles. Hence, symlinks will be created at these locations.

$HOME
├── .config
│   ├── alacritty
│   │   └── alacritty.yml
│   └── nvim
...
└── .vimrc

A symlink to a directory is created if the directory does not exist, yet. Otherwise a symlink to the file is created.

Delete symlinks with

stow -D editor

or restow them (e.g. after adding new files)

stow -R editor