Backup My Dotfiles

These days I re-configure my vim and zsh. Then backup them in github. You can see it at here.

Using github to backup dotfiles is really a comfortable way. In this way, you can:

• Feel free to change your configurations, since if you don’t like the configuration some day, you can roll it back.
• Update your configurations anywhere. Just use git to clone your configuration files from github.
• Keep different versions for different machines (Such as for desktop and laptop). Just use branch to control them.
• If you are using vim plugins from git repo or something like oh-my-zsh, you could simply use git submodule to keep track of them.

The basic idea is to put configuration files in a directory such as dotfile and use git to track it. Then make a symbolic link to home. However, manually making symbolic links is boring. Firstly I am thinking of using the same directory structure as ~/ and then automatically link them. But there come some problems: for some directories such as .vim, we should make a link for them while for some directories such as .config, we may only want to link openbox under it to ~/.config/openbox. It seems impossible to use an automatic way totally. But some shell code could make life a little easier:

check_link() {
	LINK=`pwd`/$1
	TARGET=~/$2
	if [ -h $TARGET ] ; then
		echo -n "remove symbolic link: "
		rm -v $TARGET
	elif [ -e $TARGET ] ; then
		echo -n "move: "
		mv -v $TARGET $TARGET.old
	fi
	echo -n "link: "
	ln -sv $LINK $TARGET
}

Usage: check_link <path_in_dotfiles> <path_in_home>, such as check_link vim/vimrc .vimrc. See my github repo for details.