You're missing the empathetic way to comment on someone's obviously unpaid, labor-of-love work. Instead the conversation is about you: your years of seeing "projects like these", your smart, minimal way of managing your config. Make a project and show it to us. Save your pathos for its documentation.

I use chezmoi, and I didn’t have to write a 50-line script - just install chezmoi on a new machine, run a command pointing it to a git repo, and up pop all the dot files and configs I need to have a consistent environment everywhere.

Chezmoi also handles variations in config files for personal vs. Work machines, or even differences between machines themselves.

I agree it’s not a tremendous lift to write a bespoke solution for this (and I did so in the past) but at some point it becomes lower-effort to use something off the shelf.

+1, I also don’t understand these tools. Especially these days, many apps are using ~/.config so i barely need a for loop to link everything. I like being able to slap my dotfiles on any box with my only dependencies being `bash` and either `git` or `curl | tar xzf`. At Berkeley I spent a lot of time sshing into various machines where I wasn’t root and I was only gonna use the system for a few hours. Like sshing in to each desktop in a computer lab looking for one nobody is running a build on.

It’s worked fine for me for 15 years, macOS, many Linux distros, FreeBSD.

You're missing Windows, GUI apps, and the other dozens of cli apps above 12? Also cases where symlinks break because apps delete configs before saving and the ability to differentiate between systems easier. Also the final output config is cleaner/more readable if cross-OS compatibility is offloaded to a config manager. Then templates/vars can make configs cleaner /easier to update (e.g. moved some portable apps from C to D to save ssd space, can update one var). Also can limit config diff noise by ignoring unimportant changes like latest app window position

So during my college days and a bit after that as well I used these tools because these tools were there to be used. I then learned it is not a problem for me, it never was. I used them for the sake of using them. So I stopped using those tools and tools like config backup etc.

I think such tools will be useful for people who use hundreds of apps and have to often migrate/reset or replicate those setups.

Kind of like you, my .dotfiles folder is a private github repo now which has barely 10 files and I don't even use symlinks anymore.

So I think it's also kind of a hobby, if I may say so.

chezmoi provides a handy table for features it and other dotfile managers have. I just use a bare git repo cause it's simple but i have wanted to have easier diffs between machines and secrets management at times.

https://www.chezmoi.io/comparison-table/

If that works for you, great. I split files up into multiple repos and manage them with VCSH. The modular approach lets me configure multiple machines differently. I have config on my work laptop that shouldn’t end up on my personal devices, vice versa. I don’t really need my i3 config on my MacBook Pro. Ditto for XDG paths, just as I have macOS config that doesn’t have a natural fit on a Linux desktop.

I could use one repo for work and one for personal and live with the mess of useless files, but I like the cleanliness and having simple git histories. I also don’t have to have conditional statements all over the place.

I deploy my dotfiles somewhat regularly. At my day job I almost exclusively work on virtual machines, with sometimes different distros. Being able to install my usual setup (fish for the shell, helix as the editor, and a bunch of tools like eza and bat) in a few commands just saves me time.

Now to be fair, since I use rotz for this, I also install extra packages with it. So its not purely dotfiles.

> What am I missing?

Depends on your requirements. For example, if you have any values you want to keep secret in your config files, then using a config manager can help you to not expose them in a Git repository. Also, if you work across multiple operating systems, you can use config managers to alter your config files based on the current OS.

I use home-manager for my dotfiles, and they manage quite a few things.

For example:

1. My editor config (neovim) including downloading and installing all my plugins, including the dependencies of the plugins (including deno, rust-analyzer, clippy, etc)

2. All the other tools I use, like ripgrep, python, and so on, including installing the same version on every machine I've got.

3. A bunch of misc programs and scripts I've written for myself, including all their dependencies

4. All the xdg configuration to open http links in the right browser profile, pdfs in evince, etc, as well as all the programs needed for that

5. systemd user units to run various daemons, like syncthing to sync some documents between computers, gpg-agent, etc etc.

And this works on all machines running any linux distro, from arch linux to nixos to ubuntu.

home-manager is just another dotfile manager, but since nix makes packages isolated, such that my user version of $pkg doesn't conflict or depend on the host version, home-manaer can also safely manage applications I run, like my editor, browser, developer tools, systemd units, etc etc etc.

I agree that most dotfile managers are weird overengineered projects that could have been a short shell script.

I think nix+home-manager is a weird overengineered project that could not have been a shell script.

My homedir is just a git repo, similar to https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles. The .git folder has a different name so that git commands aren't accidentally applied to it. What I love most about this is keeping my homedir clean - I can see what files are new (untracked) and either delete them or add to .gitignore

Thanks for the post, it's from your post that I adapt and find a way for my own use.

Easy to deploy, usually single static binaries. Same goes with Golang projects. Polar opposite of java (which I'll totally ignore).

It means I can install it easily and it's probably going to work well on the first try, and it'll likely start up and run fast.

It also uses clap for argument parsing so I know I can run it with `--help` to discover its options, and that the parsing of flags is likely not buggy, and consistent with other Rust tools I use.

None of this is _guaranteed_ with Rust, but the tooling and libraries make it so much easier for you to succeed at making a fast and robust piece of software. So for me "written in Rust" is usually a quality indicator of sorts. It's not 100% though, there will always be misses because it's still very possible to write bad software in any language.

Maybe it’s a way to attract contributors?

It can also serve an indicator of being in the know and with the times while also being performance-, close-to-the-metal oriented. "A dot file manager not written in Fortran, but one that could have been written in Python, but actually written in Rust"

Likely no dependency hell in pip or npm. Likely fast and well thought out. Not sure fire things, but given the choice between a program written in Rust (or Go) vs one written in JavaScript or (especially) Python, the former two win every time.

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Chezmoi is what you want.

I haven't looked at this one yet, but until someone compares it to Chezmoi and points out where it's better I'm not even looking attention I fear. Chezmoi is just that good.

I found it quite useful. My main use case for it is managing the same dotfiles for Windows and Linux. Specifically that neovim uses different folders and I can set that per OS in dotter.

It also allows for including our not including a config based on an executable being available which can be useful. It requires some configuration, depending on how many of its features you use but I think it's worth it.

I've been using "homegit" for years and never felt the need for a replacement.

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

If all you want is GNU Stow with a bit nicer UX, I wrote and have been using https://github.com/bbkane/fling for a few years now. See the demo gif in the README for the UX

I made a post recently on HN about this. All you need is git. It does everything. I didn't know why people want symlinks and everything else.

https://ericgreer.info/post/2025-08-31-simple-dotfiles-scrip...

How does your bare repo handle a config file in different paths on Windows and MacOS where you want to ignore "last_update_time" field diff noise and also have OS-specific path references?

and remember that git can also manage symlinks . so subtree can help manage major directory differences, and git symlinks can handle variations in naming or minor directory variations.

thinking of git as a FS content & metadata tracker rather than SCM , opens up a lot of unique deployment patterns that developers often overlook

Could you elaborate on using git subtree for adding dotfiles to /etc or any other root directory?

Try Stow. You can create packages for your stuff and symlink the files as needed. I have packages like git, shell, mail,…