Managing dotfiles using stow

Posted on January 14, 2023

One of my new year’s resolutions was to come up with a sensible way to manage my dotfiles. I evaluated a few solutions and finally settled on GNU stow.

GNU stow is a symlink manager, normally used to manage symlinks to programs installed in /usr/local/bin. However, it can also be used to manage symlinks to configuration files. After a bit of trial and error, I settled to the following.

Create a dirctory ~/Dropbox/dotfiles to store all the dotfiles.
For each package, create a subdictory package.
Typically, the configuration files of a package are either stored in ~/.packagerc or ~/.config/package. Let’s use zsh and kitty as canoncial examples of the two cases.
For zsh, create a file ~/Dropbox/dotfiles/zsh/dot-zshrc which has the contents of the desired .zshrc.
For kitty, create a file ~/Dropbox/dotfiles/dot-config/kitty/kitty.conf with the desired contents of ~/.config/kitty.conf
Note that in both cases, we have replaced .filename or .dirname by dot-filename and dot-dirname.

Then run the command

stow --target $HOME --dotfiles --verbose package

for each package, which creates the appropriate symlinks. That’s it!

Well almost. There is currently a bug in stow, due to which --dotfiles option does not work with directories. Fortunately, there is an AUR package stow-dotfiles-git which provides a fix, at least until the fix is merged upstream.

Update (28 Jan 2025): The bug has been resolved. So, there is no need to install stow-dotfiles-git.

It can be tedious to link each package one by one. If so, we can stow all packages at once using

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '%f ' | xargs stow --target $HOME --dotfiles --verbose

This entry was posted in OS and tagged stow, dotfile.