Posts tagged dotfiles

How to manage your dotfiles

On Unix systems, dotfiles are files that are stored in the home directory and contain configuration information. The XDG Base Directory Specification already splitted them in three categories and most applications how store their files in .cache, .config, and .local based on their purpose. And a small subset of application sticks to the root of the home directory like the most shells. In most cases you don’t need to manage your dotfiles across multiple machines, but for the ones you want to manage across multiple machines or want to be present in your devcontainer, you can use a utility like RCM and a dotfiles repository.

The first step is to create a repository on GitHub and we use the GitHub command-line tool for this, but it can also be done via the web interface. After creating the repository, it is renamed to .dotfiles at the root of the user’s home directory and makes it hidden.

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