thomas.koppandClaude Opus 5
94b6ba3c33
The repository stopped matching reality in April 2021. It describes an i3/sway desktop that no longer exists - the display menu drives xrandr outputs the machine does not have - while .zshrc alone drifted by 360 lines. Checking out master would overwrite five years of work rather than update anything. Three machines, no shared base: beastix (Arch/KDE), shron (Arch, headless), a Mac. Common .zshrc lines between all three: four. Keeps the existing bare-repo-and-alias method. The role is resolved when the shell starts, not when files are deployed, so no deployment tooling is needed at all; every machine carries every file and sources one of them. Package lists are derived from usage data - shell history, the KDE activity database, autostart, flatpak - because each signal alone has a blind spot and pacman -Qqe lists 512 packages including years of experiments. That yields 62. Plain files and plain lists throughout, so a later move to home-manager stays cheap. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
DISCLAIMER:
this is not my work I've the idea from https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/02/best-way-to-store-dotfiles-git-bare-repo/
In his words the technique below requires:
No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.
but for reason: ;)
- git and
- curl
How it work
The technique consists in storing a Git repository in a "side" folder (like $HOME/.cfg or $HOME/.myconfig) using a specially crafted alias so that commands are run against that repository and not the usual .git local folder, which would interfere with any other Git repositories around. Starting from scratch
If you haven't been tracking your configurations in a Git repository before, you can start using this technique easily with these lines:
git init --bare $HOME/.cfg
alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'
config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
echo "alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc
The first line creates a folder ~/.cfg which is a Git bare repository that will track our files. Then we create an alias config which we will use instead of the regular git when we want to interact with our configuration repository. We set a flag - local to the repository - to hide files we are not explicitly tracking yet. This is so that when you type config status and other commands later, files you are not interested in tracking will not show up as untracked. Also you can add the alias definition by hand to your .bashrc or .zshrc or use the the fourth line provided for convenience.
I packaged the above lines into a snippet up. So that you can set things up with:
curl -Lks https://ls.shron.de/dotconf | /bin/bash
After you've executed the setup, any file within the $HOME folder can be versioned with normal commands, replacing git with your newly created config alias, like:
config remote add dotconfs url.to.remote.repo
config checkout
config status
config add .vimrc
config commit -m "Add vimrc"
config add .bashrc
config commit -m "Add bashrc"
config push
Install your dotfiles onto a new system (or migrate to this setup)
config pull