A dead simple dotfiles manager.

Not yet ready for public use, as it assumes you keep your dotfiles at ~/PersonalConfigs, I need to make this configurable. Use at your own risk.

Here's how I manage my dotfiles, and if you do the same, then dotty could be for you!

I keep a repo with all my dotfiles and .config folders, but it also has other bits and pieces to help get me up and running on any new machine. A subset of this looks like:

├── README.org
├── Session.vim
├── _colors+fonts
│   ├── iterm_tokyonight_storm.itermcolors
│   └── xterm-256color-italic.terminfo
├── .config
│   ├── kitty
│   │   ├── kitty.conf
│   │   └── open-actions.conf
│   └── nvim
│       ├── init.lua
│       └── lua
│           └── codethread
│               ├── keymaps.lua
│               └── lsp
│                   ├── init.lua
│                   └── settings
│                       ├── tailwindcss.lua
│                       └── tsserver.lua
├── .dottyignore
├── .gitconfig
├── .gitignore
├── .tmux.conf
├── .stylua.toml
├── .zshrc
├── Brewfile
├── README.org
└── _packages
    └── .piplist

Dotty's approach is simple, it just symlinks this entire tree, one file at a time into my HOME directory - creating folders if needs be, without disturbing any existing folders.

Not everything gets copied however, as I don't want everything cluttering my HOME, instead dotty will look for a gitignore and gitignore_global inside my dotfiles, and ignore any files listed there. It will also read from a .dottyignore file, which is a simple list of regexps, which can be used to omit any additional files. For example I have:

^.git$
^_.*
.gitignore$
README
^.stylua.toml$
^.dottyignore$

For me, a simple _ prefix helps me keep track of what files and folders are not inteded to be linked. Not all files can follow that format, e.g .stylua.toml, hence .dottyignore allows more specific controls.

If a folder is marked as ignored, dotty will not traverse it

When dotty runs, it stores a list of created files in a temporary file, and then each time it runs, it removes these files. Empty folders will be deleted as it goes, meaning you are free to move and rename files/folders in your dotfolder as you please, and when dotty next runs, your HOME directory will be left in a clean state, before all the files are symlinked back in.

Personally I like to integrate this flow with my editor, see the wiki for an example; this means dotty is run everytime I save or delete a file in my editor (and dotty is extremely fast, so there's no issue of slowdown)

brew tap codethread/homebrew-dotty
brew install dotty

dotty help

• run

  go run main.go <cmd> ...args
  # e.g.
  go run main.go setup --dry-run

• test

  go test ./...

• add command

  go install github.com/spf13/cobra-cli@latest
  cobra-cli add <cmd>

check the wiki