GoKawiilI’ve been managing my dotfiles with GNU stow for a few years. I even wrote a piece with a corny title about that setup back in 2023. Stow served me well, but managing symlinks across multiple devices slowly became a pain in the butt.
So I started looking around for a better tool and even considered writing my own. Then a colleague pointed me to chezmoi , and so far I’m liking it a lot. It does everything I need, and I’ve started tracking my agent skill files with it too.
The machines #
I run three Macs: a MacBook Pro for work, a MacBook Air for personal use, and a Mac Mini that acts as a small personal server. The Mini mostly gets SSHed into from the other two. It’s still a Mac with my shell on it, so the same dotfiles apply.
I also keep a few Linux VMs around, but I rarely need my dotfiles on servers. Ansible provisions those. This workflow is strictly for the desktop machines.
When I outgrew stow #
Stow’s model is symlinking. The config files live in a git repo, grouped into directories that stow calls packages, and stowing a package links its files into the home directory. For a single machine it still holds up. The commands are idempotent and there’s almost nothing to learn.
The trouble is that symlinks cut both ways. Every edit on every machine writes straight through the link into that machine’s clone of the repo. Months later I’d find dirty working trees on the Air with changes I had no memory of making. Half of them conflicted with whatever the Pro had already pushed. Keeping three clones converged turned into a chore.
Fresh machines were the other half of the problem. Stow won’t link over a real file. By the time Homebrew and a couple of tools have run on a new Mac, files like ~/.zprofile and ~/.gitconfig already exist. Bootstrapping meant cloning the repo, deleting the conflicting files by hand, and restowing every package while trying to remember what I’d named them. And stow only does files. Homebrew packages and macOS settings lived in separate scripts that I had to remember to run in the right order.
How chezmoi works #
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