A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

Serious question: why Rust? Sounds like this is not exactly systems level programming or any user would suffer from or even notice garbage collection latency.<p>Is Rust building up a decent ecosystem now for application programming? When I tried developing in Rust I came to the conclusion that you pay a heavy price for not having a garbage collector. Was I doing it wrong?

I just use a “dotfiles” folder that is a git repo and then hard-link the files in there into the home directory. One for unprivileged user and one for root on each platform. Simple enough and doesn&#x27;t require an extra tool.

Looks like we took similar approaches!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cquintana92&#x2F;dotfilers">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cquintana92&#x2F;dotfilers</a><p>Congratulations, you too unlocked the &quot;None of the hundreds that are out there work exactly like I want, so I&#x27;ll write my own&quot; badge.

Completely unrelated, but I recently switched to using nix with home manager and nix-darwin to handle my entire dev setup and dotfiles.<p>If you work a lot in remote dev environments (I use coder a lot at work) that really does the trick.

There are many of these tools but i don&#x27;t like to think of these things like dotfiles. What is a dotfile? A `.something` file in my home dir? is &#x2F;etc&#x2F;environment a dotfile? No, but i wan&#x27;t to manage it still. What about Librewolf policies.json in &#x2F;usr&#x2F;lib64&#x2F;librewolf&#x2F;policies or similar. It&#x27;s not a dotfile either. For some tools, i need some other tools to exist already in path. What about zsh where i want to sync 3 git repos for syntax highlighting and other scripts? Also what about secrets, maybe i want some encrypted stuff so i need a solution for that also.<p>Ansible is the best for these things, no symlinks needed, just configure what you want to exist and where and you can template configs or copy them or use some modules like `git_config` to then generate that ini file etc. Ansible vault also handles encryption easily so i can manage ssh keys, passwords...

Pretty cool, I personally just use Stow.<p>1. git clone my dotfiles repo<p>2. run `stow .`<p>3. profit<p>This pretty much guarantees that if my Mac dies today, I can just get up and running in no time on a new machine.

&gt; This project was driven by the personal need of having to manage several dotfiles for different machines&#x2F;targets.<p>the functionality OP is searching for is already provided by chezmoi. and many more features.

Dumb yet serious question : what problem is a dotfile manager even trying to solve?<p>Personally I have a git repo in my home directory and just commit dotfiles to it. The only drawback is that git always think there’s a git repo no matter where I am in my home, so I usually rename the .git folder to .git_hidden. And on the (rare) occasion that I want to update one of my dotfiles I just rename the .git_hidden directory back to .git.<p>It’s really just two “mv” commands, I can’t believe you need a tool for just that.<p>What am I missing out on?

Is there a concise comparison between other tools?<p>Specifically looking to see where this differs from chezmoi.

Shameless plug for my bare repo git shell wrapper approach inspired by others: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;k3vinw&#x2F;simple-dotfiles-kit">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;k3vinw&#x2F;simple-dotfiles-kit</a><p>I’ve been using it for a couple years now and it’s worked well for me across multiple machines.

I&#x27;ve used a similar tool, called dotter, by SuperCuber on GitHub. It&#x27;s actually very similar--uses a handlebars template language and built in Rust. Definitely a must have if you&#x27;re on multiple *nix systems and you&#x27;ve invested time into developing your configs!

So, I&#x27;m usually the huge Rust promoter, but we already have a lot of dotfiles managers, and Chezmoi, although written in Go, is right there.<p>What can this one do that the other ones don&#x27;t?<p>The README lists features that, well, I&#x27;d already expect modern dotfile managers to be able to do.

why something so specialized needs a configuration file?<p>my dot file scripts just have very opinionated dir&#x2F;file naming conventions and things just fall into place. it&#x27;s not like you need to give tune much... even adding the template thing which i think is overkill (time would be best spent with a way to validate code cross platform of you ask me.. templating makes this more difficult while pretending to remove the need for it)

good old stow and git, as most distros come with it. though, eager to try making a replacement in go that is a single binary

From skimming it seems it is feature wise very similar to yadm.<p>Good, because I am a fan of yadm, but I also don&#x27;t feel the need to switch ;)

Why not stow? Am I missing out? I dont use Windows so not sure I need the cross platform.

Why no MacOS support if you claim cross-platform? That&#x27;s not honest.

Could have included a few screenshots.

How about using GNU stow?

Is this using ”dotfiles” as a general term for ”text based configuration files”? Is this a thing?<p>I only have two actual dotfiles on my system (git and one more)