Solely use git to version homedir's dotfiles. No extra tooling, no symlinks. Original idea from this Hacker News thread.

Download the setup script using either curl or wget. It is recommended to inspect it before running it (security).

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slmg/dotfiles/master/install.sh -o install.sh
# or
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slmg/dotfiles/master/install.sh

# Once you're happy with what the script does, execute it.
sh install.sh [--ssh] [--hard]

It is safe to run the install script without params as no existing tracked file is overwritten.

The following options are available to customise installation.

This repo is architected as a set of two main branches:

• master - to host documentation and helper scripts
• dotfiles - to host config files, only this branch is deployed locally

The branch dotfiles is deployed to $HOME through the combination of a bare git repository cloned into $HOME/.config/dotfiles.git, and the below alias dotfiles pointing git to $HOME.

alias dotfiles='git --git-dir=$HOME/.config/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME'

# Include it in your shell profile (which should live in the branch 'dotfiles').
export "alias dotfiles='git --git-dir=$HOME/.config/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME'" >> .bashrc

This trick allows to use standard git commands by substituting git to dotfiles.

Review any diff by running:

# Note that git is configured to not show untracked files when using this command.
dotfiles status

Then decide what to do using dotfiles checkout/add/commit/reset etc... Classic git workflow! :)