PBS 123 of X — Backing up and Syncing Dot Files with Chezmoi

In this week’s episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on how to use the open source tool Chezmoi to manage our dot files, those hidden configuration files on our Macs. In this installment, Bart teaches us how nearly effortless it is to sync our Chezmoi-managed dot files up to a private repo on GitHub. Seriously, it’s like 2 steps. Bart then teaches us how Chezmoi supports templating. When Bart started to describe it, I said, “Oh! It’s just like mail merge in Microsoft Office!” He laughed, and said he hoped I would say that. With Chezmoi, let’s say you have your email address in a bunch of your dot files, and you need to change it to a different address. If you use Chezmoi’s templating feature, you can create one file with your email address and in every dot file you reference that address, and only have to change it in one place. Bart walks us through a couple of worked examples to help us see exactly how it works and get a little practice. The next episode of Programming By Stealth will end this mini-series within a series, and if Bart’s work manages to finally slow down to where he can get some good thinking time, we should start up learning about PHP shortly after that. As always you can read along with Bart’s spectacular tutorial shownotes at (https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs123)