I’m especially interested in using it to build a git repo to include my .vimrc
I have tried many different ways to manage my dotfiles across different systems, IMHO the best way is using a "git bare" repository, it takes a few minutes to wrap your head around how it works (your entire home being a "selective git repo") but thankfully yadm
makes this super easy and once you have it setup properly it's life changing.
What I like the most about it is the fact that there's no more manual trigger commands to copy/symlink the files, you work on the file directly and then commit directly (as your homefolder is essentially the git repo) and here's the best thing any command that works on git works with the yadm bare repo, so you can branch, rebase, revert commits, bisect, etc.
In my dot files I have a simple alias to yadm as follows: dot='/home/bhagwan/dots/yadm/yadm --yadm-repo /home/bhagwan/dots/yadm-repo-priv -C /home/bhagwan'
and I use it as git
command replacement for the yadm repo, say I want to see diff or status I would execute dot status
(or dot diff
respectively) and even have zsh command completeion for it with tab
.
If nothing else, use yadm just for this quote (from their homepage): When you are away from your own configurations, you are an orphaned refugee in unfamiliar and hostile surroundings :-)
If this peaked your interest, you can also checkout the bootstrap script for the yadm repo from my dotfiles.