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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I use Chezmoi but I have to point out some of its downfalls vs. other dotfile managers, particularly if someone is looking to migrate to it.

    • Go’s templating lib is incredibly unergonomic.
    • Identifying file perms and visibility in by special naming convention is pretty gross. Also makes it more difficult to migrate to another solution.
    • If you’re deleting files, you need to remember to do it through chezmoi remove .... You can’t just rm them from your dotfiles directory, because chezmoi does not sync state; it simply applies what’s currently in your repo.
    • Handling multiple systems through .chezmoiignore ends up being overly verbose and unintuitive vs. the approach used by other dotfile managers

    Despite these gripes I still use it because deployment via a single binary is convenient, and there’s enough control through the generated config file + system info to handle multiple kinds of deployments sort-of-sensibly (see point 4 above).