dotGit

There are a lot of ways to manage your dotfiles. dotGit implements an idea that has been floating around on the internet for a while: a bare git repo for storing your dotfiles. A quick search finds this, but there may be older sources.

dotGit has modest aims

• 🏡keep config files where tools expect them in $HOME
• 🐚stay as light and close to git and the shell as possible
• 🚀reduce friction and make config changes quick and convenient

dotGit gives you a handful of shell aliases (tested with zsh🐚 and bash) to make dotfile management quick and easy. The shortcuts mimic a subset of those found in the oh-my-zsh git plugin.

• .g is the alias for running git with correct --git-dir and --work-tree
• .ga to git add
• .gc to git commmit
• .gco to git checkout
• .gd to run git diff
• .gss shows the git status --short
• .gp will git push
• .gl witll git pull
• .glo runs git log --oneline --decorate
• .glg runs git log --stat
• .glgp runs git log --stat --patch
• .gg runs git grep on your dotfiles. It will pass it through FZF (if available) for editing with $EDITOR on the correct line (works with vi, emacs, nano, and micro)
• .ge (requires FZF) lists all files using FZF and opens the selected file in your $EDITOR
• .lazygit (requires lazygit) will run lazygit with the correct -g and -w
• .gitui (requires gitui) will run gitui with the correct -d and -w

There are two additional aliases used to (re)set up the bare git setup.

• .ginit creates the bare git repository in $DOT_FILES directory.
• .gclone will clone the repository set in $DOT_ORIGIN into the $DOT_FILES directory

requirements

• EDITOR set to your liking
• git
• bat
• fzf (optional)
• lazygit (optional)
• gitui (optional)

installation

1. clone this repository or simply copy the aliases.sh
2. add some config sauce to your shell initialization (.i.e. .zshrc or .bashrc). The DOT_FILES and DOT_HOME variables must be set for the aliases.sh to load!

export DOT_FILES="${HOME}/.dotfiles"
export DOT_HOME="${HOME}"
export DOT_ORIGIN="git@github.com:user/your-dotfiles-repo.git" # optional
source <path to aliases.sh>`

3. restart your shell or source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bashrc
4. run .ginit or .gclone (see the initial clone setup below, if cloning)
5. .gc <branch> to checkout the config files

initial clone cleanup

Existing config files will prevent checking out the files. To list the files causing the checkout to fail, run the following.

.g checkout 2>&1|grep -E '^\s'|cut -f2-|xargs -I {} echo "{}"

To remove all the conflicting files, simply change the echo in the above command to rm. This will delete files, so be sure you want to remove them. Once the files are removed the checkout will succeed.

alternatives

• GNU Stow
• dotbare (this is close in spirit to dotGit, and can be used together with dotGit from what I can tell)
• Home Manager