README.md
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Richard Hartmann authoredRichard Hartmann authored
vcsh - manage config files in $HOME via fake bare git repositories
Index
- Contact
- Introduction
- Overview
- Getting Started
- Usage
1 Contact
There are several ways to get in touch with the author and a small but committed community around the general idea of version controlling your (digital) life.
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IRC: #vcs-home on irc.oftc.net
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Mailing list: http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home
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Pull requests or issues on https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh
2 Introduction
vcsh allows you to have several git repositories, all maintaining their working trees in $HOME without clobbering each other. That, in turn, means you can have one repository per config set (zsh, vim, ssh, etc), picking and choosing which configs you want to use on which machine.
vcsh was designed with [mr] 1 in mind so you might want to install that, as well.
Read INSTALL.md for detailed setup instructions.
The following overview will try to give you an idea of the use cases and advantages of vcsh. See sections 3 and 4 for detailed instructions and examples.
2.1 Talks
Some people found it useful to look at slides and videos explaining how vcsh works. They can all be found at here.
3 Overview
3.1 Comparison to Other Solutions
Most people who decide to put their dotfiles under version control start with a single repository in $HOME, adding all their dotfiles (and possibly more) to it. This works, of course, but can become a nuisance as soon as you try to manage more than one host.
The next logical step is to create single-purpose repositories in, for example, ~/.dotfiles and to create symbolic links in $HOME. This gives you the flexibility to check out only certain repositories on different hosts. The downsides of this approach are the necessary manual steps of cloning and symlinking the individual repositories. It will probably become a nuisance when you try to manage more than two hosts.
vcsh takes this second approach one step further. It expects single-purpose repositories and stores them in a hidden directory (similar to ~/.dotfiles). However, it does not create symbolic links in $HOME; it puts the actual files right into $HOME.
Furthermore, by making use of [mr] 1, it makes it very easy to enable/disable and clone a large number of repositories. The use of mr is technically optional (see 4.3), but it will be an integral part of the proposed system that follows.