Keep dotfiles where they belong and avoid symlinks entirely.

This arrangement of dotfiles is taken from here and here. The idea is to keep all the dotfiles at their original locations, and avoid symlinks entirely (as opposed to the general approach of putting all config files in one directory and symlinking them with a script or GNU stow). Basically, we create a bare git repo and set the work-tree to be our $HOME directory. Then everytime we add a new config file to this repo, we do so specifying this work-tree (we make this easy by defining an alias command). This lets us keep the config files at their original locations, while also allowing them to be under version control. Here's how to do it:

First time setup

git init --bare $HOME/.cfg
alias dotfiles='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
dotfiles config --local core.sparsecheckout true
touch $HOME/.cfg/info/sparse-checkout
dotfiles remote add origin git@github.com:DalkMania/mac-dotfiles.git

Ignore README.md

Put the following content in the $HOME/.cfg/info/sparse-checkout file, to avoid pulling it from git and having it in your $HOME directory.

/*
!README.md

You'll need to change the remote URL to your git repo. You should also add the dotfiles alias command to your .bashrc or .zshrc. Now, you can use the dotfiles command to do git operation from anywhere in your $HOME directory:

Operations

cd $HOME
dotfiles add .tmux.conf
dotfiles commit -m "Add .tmux.conf"
dotfiles push

New machine setup

To set up a new machine, clone the repo to a temporary directory. This is because you might have some default config files in your $HOME which will cause a normal clone to fail.

git clone --separate-git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles git@github.com:DalkMania/mac-dotfiles.git tmpdotfiles
rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude 'README.md' --exclude '.git' tmpdotfiles/ $HOME/
rm -r tmpdotfiles