Historical theologians and GNU/Linux geeks both crave order where order is hard to find. Legacy file types and minor conflicting precedents in the tradition cause chaos to fall as acid rain on the continents in which each group’s members work. One drop of order brings sweet, albeit temporary, relief—whether it be a coherent summary of the regula fidei such as St. John Damascene’s De fide orthodoxa or an efficient CLI & GUI package management tool such as Manjaro’s pamac.
GNU/Linux dotfiles are notoriously unruly. Some applications follow the /home/user/.config/___ placement standard, others expect their dotfiles to be directly in the home directory, and eccentrics place their dotfiles in locations that seem altogether random. Some of the disorderliness can be mediated with reorganization—but not all.
Amid the mess, I have found a tool that makes at least backing up and organizing the dotfiles in my custom Debian installation with spectrwm more efficient: Yet Another Dotfiles Manager (yadm). The core purpose of yadm is to streamline syncing dotfiles with a git repository. As a beginner with dotfiles and (especially) dotfile management, I use yadm to maintain a simple repository in GitHub (historical-theology/spectrwm-dotfiles).
yadm takes standard git commands, including:
yadm clone
yadm add [.config, etc.]
yadm commit -a
yadm pushWhat sets yadm apart from normal git is that (as the name suggests) it is designed specifically for work with dotfiles. It has a variety of features for that purpose, such as allowing a person to include custom dotfiles installation scripts in his yadm configuration and helping him maintain separate sets of dotfiles for different GNU/Linux installations in the same repository.
I have (wildly) disparate dotfiles for Manjaro i3 on my desktop and Debian 10 with spectrwm on my laptop. In case I should need to perform a fresh installation of either, I would like to be able to bring it back to my own arrangement quickly in order to resume working. Thus, I intend to make use of some of yadm’s advanced features in the near future.
yadm keeps everything contained in a regular git repository that can be cloned with the standard “git clone” command. If you would like to test my (work in progress and humble) white-on-black dotfiles for spectrwm, urxvt, and other software, feel free to make a clone. You might choose to fork the repository in GitHub to start building your own minimal, white-on-black tiling window manager setup. I license all of my little tinkers that make it into that repository with the MIT License, so you are free to do with them whatever you would like. Tinkers that I have duplicated from others are all free (libre), as well; although most geeks do not care what others do with their dotfiles, we must try to maintain the credit and licensing chains for those who do.
Dotfiles are meant to be copied and adapted rather than written from scratch. The origin of each component of a particular dotfile might be lost, and the resultant dotfile might be messy, but what matters most is that it works. Hence there is at least one spot of common ground between a dotfile and a classic theological treatise, an isthmus bridging the continent of the geek and the continent of the theologian. What matters most in a treatise is that it communicates orthodoxy, not that the sources behind it be immediately obvious nor even that the treatise itself be as tidy as the reader would prefer.
Deus vos benedicat,
Corey Stephan