PBS 122 of X – Managing Dot Files with Chezmoi

In our previous installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart introduced us to Chezmoi, an open source tool to help us manage dot files, those hidden configuration files that get created on our Macs. Configuration files contain information about how we like our Macs configured, including where to access our ssh keys and our preferred command line editor and more. If we move between computers it would be nice to have the same configuration, or if we do a clean install it would be great to be able to have these dot files in place on our newly-formatted machines. He teased us last time though but just introducing us to Chezmoi and not letting us do much. In this installment he lets us take Chezmoi out for a spin. We edit an environment variable to set our preferred text editor, and then use Chezmoi to talk to Git to add and then commit those changes. Along with more changes and actions with Chezmoi, Bart works hard to cement the terminology of Chezmoi because without it, it’s easy to not realize what Chezmoi is doing under the hood and it could cause problems in the future. You can find the shownotes for this episode at pbs.bartificer.net/… (https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs122).