[gary_bernhardt]

I've had my dotfiles under version control for over a decade (hg for a couple years, then git). I've never used or felt the need for any special tools, and I don't use any extra symlinking.

If you do that stuff, great, but here's what I do if you don't want to use any specialized tools:

My home directory is just a git repo. There's a regular old ~/.git directory. All of the management I do is regular git stuff, like any other repo. Everything I don't want to commit is listed in .gitignore, like any repo.

The only wrinkle is setting up a new machine. You can't clone into an existing directory (AFAIK), and your home directory already exists, so you need a workaround. An easy solution: clone the remote repo to ~/dotfiles, then `mv ~/dotfiles/.git ~`, then `rm -r ~/dotfiles`. Now your home directory is a git repo where the working copy is exactly as the home directory was before, and HEAD points to your repo's default branch. It will be dirty because all of your config files are missing. Use regular `git status` to take a look. It's always looked fine to me, so I `git checkout .`, which effectively installs the dotfiles. Then I'm done until I need to do that copy trick again when I buy my next computer. In the meantime I just commit and push as normal, and occasionally add a new file to .gitignore.

[ludocode]

That's nice, until you accidentally type "git clean -fdx" into the wrong terminal and nuke your home directory. I would be way too scared to have all my files be untracked in an unclean repo.

[gary_bernhardt]

I use `git clean` maybe once per year on average, so very low risk for me. And if that ever happens... that's why I have hourly backup snapshots! If I didn't trust my backups, I'd definitely address that before worrying about dotfile management. If you don't have a good safety net then you end up reinventing the net 100 times in other ways and everything gets more complicated.