I created a dotfiles management tool, yadm https://yadm.io https://yadm.io I'm a huge fan of Git, and the Git mental model just makes sense to me. I wanted to

I created a dotfiles management tool, yadm https://yadm.io https://yadm.io I'm a huge fan of Git, and the Git mental model just makes sense to me. I wanted to manage my dotfiles in the same way. At the time I had tried several other solutions, mostly similar tools like homeschick and vcsh. I wanted a solution that was very portable, which both of those existing tools were. However, homeschick became a bit clunky to use because each time I wanted to do most operations I had to first "cd" into my "castle". In addition, that tool used symlinks, which doesn't work out well to manage a file that may get overwritten by a tool. vcsh was the other main tool I tried. This tool adopts the bare repo technique, allowing files to be used instead of symlinks. The major drawback it had was that it was designed to work with multiple repos, and forces you to specify the repo with every command. Some simple aliasing helped mitigate that though. But by that time I also started writing some custom code to encrypt private data and was struggling to maintain different branches for different systems which had slight tweaks to configurations. It just became all fragmented and difficult to manage. That is what lead me to create my own tool. The important features I wanted: portability, seamless interaction with Git, alternate files for different hosts, encryption for private data. I shared it as open source back in 2015 and it has grown in popularity some. It's been improved a lot over time including contributions from others. I'm glad so many others have found it useful.