Give Your Dotfiles a Home with GNU Stow

[@crazychicken0378]

This isn’t just a lisp channel, it’s a gnu channel imo. Guix, emacs/emacs lisp, stow, screen, yeah you don’t give me the vibe that people usually do but you’re a really cool free software advocate without being a free software advocate haha

[@SystemCrafters]

Just curious, what vibe do others give you?

[@crazychicken0378]

@@SystemCrafters they can be a bit pushy and rude about not using free software. I just see you as sharing something you thought would be very productive

[@Magnus_E]

@@SystemCrafters You are amazing never forget that. You give dotfiles/video slides in every (or almost? idk) video you make this is really helpful for us/me. Thanks for the amazing content. You don't need to worry about everybody, only for good people ;) :D:D:D Take care!

[@skia5635]

That's why I subscribed

[@DavidWenzlick]

This video just saved me a boat load of time. I have been managing my dotfiles in git for a while now, but I never took the time to automate the symlink creation. I was about 30% of the way done automation the symlink creation via a custom bash script. Now I don't need to finish that project and can work on more interesting things. Thank you!

[@SystemCrafters]

Awesome, really glad to hear that! I also tried writing a custom bash script for this in the past, it was a pain

[@ViniciusProvenzano]

Great video! Stow changed my life a few years ago.

[@pauljamesharper]

I have been using 'Prot's Dots for Debian' for a while now. It uses Stow. But I really appreciate the detailed explanation. Especially the syncing script.

[@samrjack]

Was waiting for this vid since your dot files video! Thanks for the content.

[@Timjstewart]

Thanks for providing the synchronizing script!

[@humanlytyped]

Thanks for this video. I'll use ansible to manage my system packages and stow for managing my dotfiles. This is good.

[@FekuEntertainmentLtd]

Another cool thing about stow / Another way to organize is to have folders inside your ~/.dotfiles folder for specific configs. Like for e.g. I keep all my bash configs, like .bashrc, .bash_aliases, etc inside ~/.dotfiles/bash and I can simply do a "stow bash" if I want to include that in my $HOME. The reason for the separate folders in that, on my personal machine I use fish shell. So I don't want to stow that on my office machine, where people have bash scripts written all over the codebase. Basically, I can choose what things I want to stow where I want to stow.

[@Xdavidel]

One thing I'm exploring is using org mode to tangle one big dotfile into multiple configs and place them in the right place depending on the system.

[@SystemCrafters]

Definitely possible! I think ultimately some files won't really belong in the Org-based config so you may end up using a combination of both. That's one scenario I'm trying to account for with my own dotcrafter.el package (which isn't fully ready for use yet)

[@nichtgestalt]

I'm always coming back to you! First because of Emacs, than Gnu GUIX and now Gnu Stow. Does it also manage the permissions of the files? For example sxhkdrc and bspwmrc needs to be executable and as far as I know files cloned from github are not executable. Anyway, this really looks super convenient and I'll definitely give it a try. So thank you very much for this awesome tutorial. :D

[@TheGreatMcPain]

If stow throws an error about a normal file that already exists, instead of deleting that file in the home directory it might be better to re-run stow with the '--adopt' parameter. This parameter imports existing files into your stow directory, and then creates a symlink. Unfortunately it won't work on files that are already symlinks, but at least it'll take care of the bulk of it automatically. Also, assuming the stow directory is under version control you'll be able see differences between your repository, and the files that got "adopted".

[@SystemCrafters]

Yep, I saw the adopt parameter there but wasn't sure if it's more dangerous to suggest it in case someone breaks their setup with it

[@davidvogel2387]

Thanks David informative vid. Are you able to manage multiple os’s with Stow? Are conditional expressions allowed? I’m running on both linux and darwin. Lastly, does stow have the ability to manage secrets? Thxs

[@SystemCrafters]

Stow only manages symbolic links so I use Org Babel to tangle out configurations with per-machine customizations and I store secrets in the `pass` program.

[@famailiaanima]

For some reason I can't ingore a file in my .stow-local-ignore. It is a simple .txt file in .dotfiles/. Anyone knows how to do this?

[@To1ne]

There seems to be a small delay on your video. Please consider adding a delay to your audio in OBS to sync them up (easy to test when you clap your hands).

[@SystemCrafters]

I believe I caused this problem while editing, do you notice the problem in other videos?

[@To1ne]

@@SystemCrafters I originally saw it in kzbin.info/www/bejne/sIisc6ysba-CqMk, where it shows a lot more.

[@superspectator123]

Very good video. Thank you.

[@sayanghosh6996]

11:14 stop using `-rf` when its not required. Always use principle of least priviledge. If you are removing just a normal file, you dont need -r or -f. This bad habit can lead you to delete some important folder by mistake if you type name of a folder instead of some file you wanted to delete, and -r and -f will make sure to delete that folder without warnings.

[@oskarwerner2164]

If you use emacs and "Symbolic link to Git-controlled source file; follow link? (yes or no)" show up, just add (setq vc-follow-symlinks t) to you config.

[@dmitryshinkaruk8024]

Thank you some much for this!

[@shawnzhuang1392]

awesome video thanks! what are you using to display the show notes/presentation thing in the video?

[@SystemCrafters]

Check out the latest video on the channel, I explain it in detail!

[@shawnzhuang1392]

thank u!!

[@tarikzaki5442]

do i have to delete the files in the home directory before stow-ing them ?

[@abrampers]

I'm currently using rcm for dotfiles manager. Do you have any pros and cons of stow compared to rcm?

[@SystemCrafters]

I haven't tried rcm yet!

[@camrouxbg]

This is great! Though I'm confused a bit about the sync-then-stow thing. I would have thought that the symlinks meant the ~/.profile always points to ~/.dotfiles/.profile, and so modifying ~/.dotfiles/.profile would be instantly seen by ~/.profile. Maybe I'm just not understanding how git works (it is likely, I only use it for this and I'm not a programmer, per se). That said, I'm getting some errors when I run stow. "Absolute/relative mismatch between Stow dir .dotfiles and path /home/brad/.dotfiles/.zshrc", followed by "existing target is not owned by stow: .zshrc". I probably missed something simple in the video, so I'll rewatch anyway :)

[@SystemCrafters]

You're right, if a folder has been symlinked then you won't need to worry about it, but if a new folder or file has been added which hasn't already been linked then a new link will need to be created in the home folder for it. Regarding the errors, you need to make sure that the target files don't currently exist in the target folder, so if you copied your .zshrc file to ~/.dotfiles you probably need to delete the original in your home folder before it will work.

[@camrouxbg]

All good. I hadn't deleted the links I already had in my home and .config directories.

[@camrouxbg]

@@SystemCrafters Okay, I see. So it's a safety mechanism more than anything. To be safe, make sure you commit then stow.

[@azinsharaf222]

and what font are you using in the slides? it looks nice

[@JanneSauvala]

Thanks, great video!

[@pascal7947]

I use a git bare repository to manage my dotfiles with git. Does GNU Stow have an easy way to manage difference in dotfiles on 2 machines?

[@SystemCrafters]

Check out the comment on this video by Adam Logghe for an approach you can use for that

[@TheRcortezk9]

I have a newbie question. Could you reverse the order? For example, could you symlink from the $HOME to another file?

[@Mohamed_Fayyad]

I am a beginner in Linux, and when I was searching for how to save dot files, I noticed two methods, one using git bare repository and the other method using stow. What is the difference between them? Why do I use one method over the other?

[@AlwynSchoeman]

Is there any alternative to stow that allows you to manage different versions of a package. For example, you may different neovim configurations of emacs configurations, all of which wants to live in the same folder...

[@FirkraagAurel]

Stow is pretty buggy and 2+ year old bugs don't get fixed/deployed. Especially the "--dotfiles don't work with directories bug" is bad. Alternatives?

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks!!!

[@some_phd7655]

nice starter video. I tried to use the provided script, but I run into some permission denied errors... I make the script executable with "chmod +x", but then I get permission denied on line 26 and 33...

[@lieutanant8058]

Are there any advantages of Stow over something like org-mode with source blocks tangling to a config file? I currently use this and am very happy with it.

[@vp4744]

Both solutions are customary, i.e., you learn by habit and custom. If you don't need the functionality, then it becomes a burden with no payoff. I'm moving from org tangling to stow for packages I need to compile and juggle several versions. Stow helps me automate compiling, testing, error reporting and deleting. Org tangling can't do all that without replicating what stow does.

[@azinsharaf222]

Hi. What is the app you created the slides?

[@kiddjmadd]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/iXSzoHlnhbmNpqs

[@laughingvampire7555]

the problem with stow is that you pollute the file system with links, this is why the guys at Atlassian proposed the git bare repo.

[@amit12000]

why not git bare method any specific reason

[@nevoyu]

And here I just use a bare git repo

[@BarbaraBrown-w2d]

Angie Manors