GNU Stow

Installation

On Mac

brew stow

On Linux (Debian)

sudo apt install stow

Usage

I currently use stow to manage dotfiles. First, create a directory ~/dotfiles and then navigatte into that directory. Then run the following to create the symlinks.

stow .

Tip

The structure of the dotfiles repository should be the same as the home directory.

Ignoring files

Files that should not be synced by stow should be placed in .stow-local-ignore. This will prevent symlinks from being created. I use this for shell scripts that are used to install things but should not be synced up to my home directory. The formatting for this file is the same as .gitignore.