wtf are dotfiles?

Probably the best overview of Stow I've ever seen!

No more bash for loops to copy files and create their symlinks! This is soooo good! Thank you!

I used to perform ‘ln -s’ multiple times This is useful ! Thank you for making the video on introducing stow and how to use it.

I started using Stow a decade ago, and it changed everything for me! Pro tip: If you do have more than one machine, you might require some dotfiles to have different content. Or you might not use all the same tools on every machine. Create different subdirs of your `dotfiles` dir, and use `stow subdir`. I will leave as an exercise for advanced users a script that can run on a new machine and auto-stow subdirs based on what that script can learn from its environment. Bonus points if it is idempotent and can install dependencies like git on its own.

This is so useful, I never even heard of stow before! Dotfiles clutter the home directory so much and this is by far the most convenient way to solve this issue, thanks.

This video is pure gold. It's the first time I've heard about stow and it seems like a great solution to the dot files problem. You keep to to the point and actually address the few common issues. Thank you!

Just stumbled upon this seemingly very new channel, seems like some awesome and high quality content. Very curious to see where you’re going with this channel, great videos so far.

I set up stow 4 or 5 years ago (however I used a sub folder per application, it's a lot cleaner and modular imo) and never had to touch it ever again, it just works. Just need to git push when I change something in a config file. Probably one of the most time saving tool I ever used.

I heard about stow forever ago but didn't know how to use it. I read some of the official docs but my eyes glazed over and I gave up. This video convinced me to give it a go.

Stow can also take a target directory (-t TARGET) so if you don’t want to keep your dotfiles repo directly under your home directory you can use that. For me I would do “stow -t /home/username .” From the dotfiles repo which could be anywhere.

Found out about stow a few months back when trying to manage my dotfiles Hope this video spreads its utilization

20+ years Linux user here, never heard of Stow before... I will definitely check this out! Thanks for making this video.

You can also use stow to keep your app configurations separate, like say if you have a tmux config for your local config, and a tmux config that is slightly different for a server, you can put all of the files in two separate folders, then instead of specifying . You use the other folder name like `stow tmux-server` or `stow tmux-local`

I was managing my own symlinks for this time. I though that stow was more complex but I was wrong. Thank you for this amazing and pleasant video!!

Underrated channel man. Keep it up!

What a great tool! I have been struggling with a homegrown solution in a Makefile, but this is so much better. Though I have been using Syncthing to keep the directory synchronised between machine instead of Git. Just so I don't need to remember to commit, push and pull changes.

Gosh, this is so simple and straightforward, plus it’s way better than what I was doing: I had a similar folder under my $HOME but I also had a bash script that you had to run which would basically rsync. Sort of a facepalm moment realizing you could just symlink _and_ automate the symlink process w/ just having stow.

Amazing tutorial, very easy and straight to the point!

Very nice explanation, and channel! Keep up the good work! I would love to see a video showing your tmux customization.

when is “since i use nixOS, btw” coming to DoA 🙏

Very well made and higly informative. Keep it up!

holy shit. why is this not talked about more? i've been using linux as my daily driver for a year now and this is the first time i've heard anyone talk about this. this is a freaking game changer

Beautifully done. Amazing tool, thank you!

thank you so much for this video, I haven't heard of Stow before. my dotfiles repo was the most atrocious thing ever lmao this is gonna be a fun weekend to update all that

Woah, this is incredibly useful. Thank you so much! Here's hoping more people spread the knowledge about _stow_

First time to know about Stow. Will try it soon. Thank you 👍

Very cool. Will implement this weekend. Thanks for the great video, you're awesome.

Love this approach! I also was using a bare git setup but found it hard to work with. I'll switch to this way from now on

Great video, I've already put my vim config in git. Now I can put the rest of my setup in there as well. Much appreciated!

Great video as always! Keep going ❤

your fonts are pure treat

This is a neat find! I had rolled out my own script to sort of do this, but I'd manually have to add any new tool to that script. This automates that portion. Thanks for sharing, will give it a go

I love how you explain how to push things to a remote to people that care about dotfiles management.

Wow, I instantly switched to stow after this video. Thanks!

I've used rcm for many years. It has the added benefit of prepending a dot to all files and folders in the top level of your dotfiles folder, thus allowing us to use ls normally (e.g. dotfiles/config symlinks to ~/.config).

Amazing. I didn't use symlinks, but stow will help me a lot in setting up my configuration scripts. Thanks a lot.

Just fighting with how to add some more organization to my dotfiles. For once, the algorithm did not lead me down a rabbit hole of distraction- it read my mind. Thank you!

Thank you very much for this brilliant idea!

I use a bare repo and a few handy aliases but I like stow will try it thank you for this amazing video!

thank u so much, i tried to write a script to manage my dotfiles and almost just deleted them, i really needed this thank u so much

I was about 24 hours from setting up a bare repo like every other tutorial, and then this came out! Perfectly timed!

kinda funny, but this is how my dotfiles are currently setup, i just have a script that symlinks them myself. some i don't, such as files i have to merge between personal and work stuff, but yeah . . i can replace that entire script with one command .. wild. awesome vid!

I've been using Stow for two years now, with Git to sync my changes across my Mac and Windows WSL2 machines. Like the simplicity.

I used to do pretty much the exact same thing manually, but GNU stow seems nice. I'll give it a try.

Awesome channel, already watched 66% 😉, looking forward to much more!!!

this is the greatest thing i have ever done. hyprland on laptop and desktop configs being synced is the most goated thing ever.

This is godsend, was planning on having a dotfiles repo but I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of guides out there that seemed too opinionated.

Thanks for the great video. I personally use rcm but will give stow a try.

Great video. Thank you. I manage my dotfiles in a similar way but without stow. I have created a bash script that creates all required symlinks for me. With this setup, I can get rid of the .config folder in the dotfiles folder which makes the structure more readable.

Thank you for the inspiration.

home-manager users in shambles

@InsanceFirebat Great video on an important subject. As a developer, all those configurations are an often overlooked piece of information to backup. Stow is a good solution for single-machine environment, but when you have multiple machines or virtual machines with different needs, I would suggest RCM. RCM supports tags, whereby the environment can be named. So, common things (git, tmux, etc) configurations can all be shared, but shell environment (.zshrc, per-machine scripts, etc) can be unique to each machine.

Heard about stow about a year ago but seemed awkward. Instead I've been writing one too many 'ln -s' in my setup scripts and it dayum it might be about time. Ye've truly pushed to try stow, cheers mate. Can't wait for the self-hosted git server vid!

simple and to the point, thank you :)

I switched from manual configuration to stow to chezmoi to ansible. Now I'm not looking back. Ansible is a perfect fit (for me) to manage dotfiles and much more. Every other solutions were making things very rigid: it was hard when not impossible to manage multiple systems, symlinks were often causing sneaky problems to some programs, it was unnatural to deploy only a subset of the dotfiles. But the best part with ansible in my opinion is that it can also manage system configuration (packages to install, /etc, or basically anything I need). Now when I need to deploy my config to a new device, I just run all my playbooks and voilà. I don't even have to remember which programs to install, what were my firewall rules, where to put that custom systemd service file. Ansible handles all that for me in a very customizable way.

Extremely useful, thanks a lot

I manage my dotfiles manually with git. Made a ~/.dots directory, moved most my configs there and symlinked them back to the right places. Created a git repo in there and everything just works no problem (tho I made the mistake of putting a GPG key on the repo). It's kinda like using stow, but I just do the symlinks myself. Deployment is also easy because it only really needs coreutils (and optionally git and gnupg for managing the repo).

I actually like this, I'm not going to lie. I'm sold

Thanks for this!

Beautiful video

Nice video, I've been using stow for a long time, but for each application I use a sub folder and in git I use a branch for each hardware or use !!!

great one. Thanks for sharing

You created a new channel without knowing it!!!! :OOOO Insta-subscribed

last time i used stow was about a decade ago. but it's interesting and i may change my setup. good video

Just the video i needed

I think this has convinced me to make a switch again in how my dotfiles were being setup. I was following my friend who initially did shell scripting configs, then I ended up switching to Ansible. Still trying to figure it out as I am trying to make different use case dotfiles (e.g. work, personal etc). But I think I'll do a switch at some point and figure out the logistics later - thanks for this video!

stow is great and I used it for over a year. Would also suggest building out an ANSIBLE role that completely configures any number of machines fully to the way you like it. Another great option is a lightweight container image with zsh and a config repo/sshkey baked in.

Thank you very much, for half a year I played with windows manager and I was constantly updating my dotfiles on many pc and it was really annoying, this method seems great I'm on my way to try it !

thx for the video. I have been using stow for several years to manage my dotfiles. I advise you to consider the following options: - R || -- restow : allows you to delete all existing links and recreate all links. As iniquated in the manual: « This is useful for trimming obsolete symbolic links of the target tree after updating -the software in a package- - > your git dotfiles repo. -- dotfiles: All files starting with « dot- » will be linked by the replacement « dot- » by « » ".". Example dot-zshrc ->.zshrc -- ignore: does not take into account the indicated paths, practical for not using configurations depending on the type of machine (workstation or server).

i found a great channel today

put stuff in subfolders to group your dotfiles, like "zsh" or "Alacritty". That way, you can choose which dotfiles to restore and use the same dotfiles repo in vastly different environments. You can even have multible versions of the same dotfiles and switch between them easily

I used to have arch on my pc... Long time ago. Now i'm mac user, but still, if i'll have to choose distro - it will be arch. Because Arch has best wiki and require some knowledge and approach :) love your videos, keep going

I've been developing my own config files sync program for the last few weeks. Now I see this and makes my whole project useless since this is so much better 😭

Wow 😍 This is the cleanest and prittiest terminal setup i've ever seen, can you please tell what fonts and color scheme are using? And the color of the word based on if the command is right, and suggestions too, are from zsh basic config or some external plugin? The prompt is starship, right? I just wanna use this setup for my shell too 😆

Very nice seeing your take on stow. I've been using a setup with stow for years now and it's really great. BTW you don't need to set your files as if they were in the home directory... I find that to be not so organized, specially if you have machines that use different setups, like one for your mac and one for your linux. Alternatively you can pass down some flags to stow to specify the target DIR... so I made a custom script to do that and I have a "packages" folder in my dotfiles where those configurations live pretty much like "packages", which are "stowable" configs I can pick and chose. Like a ".dotfiles/packages/encfs" is a config I can stow on linux while ".dotfiles/packages/macos-encfs" I can stow on apple machines That's close to stow's original use case as it was created as a way to maintain multiple package versions, like multiple different installations of PERL with different symlink files. Stow is also smart enough to handle complex situations where configurations would conflict.... stow will by default symlink the upmost directory / file and then recriate symlinks automatically in a more granular manner to acomodate other "stow installations" you make using the same ownership (read the docs for more info)... it sounds complicated but it isn't once you see it in action. It's pretty genius the way stow handles itself in the file tree. In practice what it means is that you could have a ZSH config for example that is your general config in a public ".dotfiles" repo "installed" at the same time as a personal ".dotfiles" ZSH config that lives in a private repo and has some custom bindings you might not wanna share publicly 😉 Anyway, if you are reading this comment up to this point maybe you could have a fun weekend project by feeding the Stow's Manual Page to ChatGPT and asking it to help you set it up. My strategy is to keep all created symlinks proxied in an "installed" folder, also in the ".dotfiles" but gitignored, to be more organized and to help stow because of how it handles Ownership ( and handles conflicts ) Here's some documentation reference in case you go this far: www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html#Ownership Good luck Unix Adventurer!

Great vídeo!

Good video!

great video! i expected this channel to have at least 50k subs lmao. great production quality

tanks!!! for the info!!

nice video, thank you!

Thanks for the video. Btw if you are on Gnome, can you share which theme you're using? I'm assuming it's one of the macOS inspired themes.

Is there a change we could get an overview of your terminal and desktop/wm setup? It looks so nice and functional

great videos!!!

Man your transitions are sweet. What Editor do you use to make them?

Thank you! This video is really clear and understandable. I created my own little script to symlink my dotfiles to the right locations, but there were many bugs. I will switch to stow, because it does exactly what I need.

Your Videos are very promising. I already recommended your channel to several collegues. How about a part 2, how to handle .env files (or an alternative) with secrets and keys properly?

Hell yeah, I'm working on this exact thing right now. Thanks for doing all this research for me and sharing

i am more of a bare repo kinda guy. some years ago, yadm came along to make that way easier to handle, and i have never looked back since.

I wish I could like this video twice.

I use vcsh to manage my entire ~. It allows me to put ~ into multiple git repositories. So I can have a repo for history files, one for desktop systems, some for a base home dir, etc.

Noob friendly but still concise, very nice!

quick tip, you can use ctrl+l to clear the screen instead of running the clear command, works by out of the box in most shells

Hey dude this video is brilliant I can now stop acting like a Neanderthal, with regard to how I manage my dot files. I always felt I was walking a tight rope making changes to my zshrc files that may or may not break without having a clean way to revert changes instead relying on manual backing up files with .back2 .back3 ad infinitum. Using stow alongside git is going to be fantastic so I thank you most wholeheartedly for making this video

I've been using since 2017+- a bare repo setup very similar what stow does, but totally manually managed

I need your terminal config!! Fonts, theme, EVERYTHING!

Hey, what terminal styler (e.g Oh-my-posh, starship, etc) do you use? I like it alot. and also this helped me alot!

I use yadm, it is much more easier because you don't have to worry about creating a separate folder, it uses bare repository but is a complete wrapper on Git. Just create the file where it is supposed to be and run "yadm add FILE" then "yadm commit -m 'fix: issue with my FILE'" then "yadm push". It also have things like templating for cases where you want to run some logic based on the OS and other factors. And to end it all, you can add a bootstrap script that can be run on new systems, useful for when you want to create a reproduceable setup.

I simply created a shell script that created symlinks for each of my dotfiles. Stow will make it much easier and prevent me from having to add each new dotfile to the script

Nice tip