this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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I was kind of surprised to see this article on HackerNews, so I thought I'd ask here; how do you handle your dotfiles and do you share them publicly?

My own dotfiles started from those provided by ArcoLinux, with a bunch of changes over the years I had them. Currently installed using Ansible, because that's more sensible than Bash for this imo.

https://git.exu.li/exu/configs

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[–] eta@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you mean the username of your home directory? Because you can also use "$HOME" in scripts to refer to it without having to give the specific file path

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Ah yeah, that didn't make a ton of sense. To some degree, I wanted to say that it may show up in various config files, which you're right, I could template with a shell script.

But then I'm using Nix for scripting, which has a concept that everything should be defined in the repo, so you shouldn't have dependencies on external state like $HOME or $USER.

I'm still working out to what degree that's actually necessary/useful (and I do have a workaround, so I don't need to check in my username). But I'm guessing, it comes partially from the 'proper' thing being NixOS, where you define the whole OS in your configuration, so you would need to type out at some point anyways, what the user should be called, so that it can create it.