Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

I had similar problems with GNU Stow, but switched to Nix and Home Manager instead.

I think Chezmoi's templates and file naming conventions don't click for me, but it's nice to see a good variety in this problem space.

It’s quite new but I’ve been cooking up some new bootstrapping features with mise which people may find relevant here: https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap.html

It’s for things like dotfiles, apt/brew packages, and LaunchAgents/systemd.

Once you hit the Chezmoi stage, you're only about 6 months from Nix and Home Manager. I mean, why climb _almost_ to the top of a mountain and then just sit down?

Switched to Chezmoi from random assortment of manually authored scripts. The workflow takes some getting used to, because I constantly edit the actual files without calling `chezmoi edit` first, and have to merge.

I like that when combined with `mise` (https://mise.jdx.dev) I can roll out a new computer in 2-3 commands and have my entire environment configured the way I like, with neovim and all the plugins and language servers.

~50 years of distributed systems research and this is a problem we still have to deal with today. Sad!

It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.

Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.

I've been using [yadm](https://yadm.io/) instead which works really well!

I must've tried to set up stow five or six times over the years, in between various hand rolled custom setups. I can't put my finger on why but I set up chez moi & it's been my setup since, much longer than any previous solution.

Chez moi is definitely not without its rough edges but it seems to have gotten the subtle essentials right enough for adhd me to not have abandoned it yet.

I’ve always managed this problem in a different way. I don’t know if my way is better, but it works really well for me.

I treat my powerful desktop computer as my main machine. Then I have a bunch of laptops.

Then I just rsync my entire home directory out to all the laptops.

From there. The rule is quite simple. Any file created on a laptop are considered ephemeral. If I create data that I have to keep. It gets rsynced back the other direction to the main machine.

This process has served me well for at least 15 years now and is supported by a small handful of shell scripts to automate this process

i feel like using GNU stow to manage your dotfiles has always been a hack.. has it ever been a supported usecase?

stow is an indispensable tool for me to manage /usr/local for manually installed software. my workflow goes:

  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/myapp
  make && make install
  stow myapp

now, myapp and all its supporting files are in the right place in /usr/local. if i want to "uninstall", i just run

  stow -D myapp

Chezmoi strikes a nice balance between the overkill of home-manager while still being more powerful than simpler solutions.

Yadm is another alternative, the main thing I don't like about it though is that I'm not a fan of cross OS dotfiles. Having niri files on my work Mac and aerospace dotfiles on Linux annoys me quite a bit.

As powerful as the templating in chezmoi is, I think it should be considered a last resort and only used for simple files. They break your editor features like highlighting.

I hate . dirs. In fact, I hate them so much that I don't use them.

My configuration lives primarily in .yml files. These are kept super-simple. When need be and another format is required, ruby autogenerates these for me. For instance, all my bash aliases are kept in .yml files which then get turned into bash rc files or any other target format for other shells. Same for most of my other configuration too - not always .yml but usually some text file. I never understood the neet for .foobar directories or files. They just hide a system that is intrinsically ugly and needlessly complicated.