The very firsts problems when you start ricing your linux distro is that dotfiles are strange to keep updated because everything is scattered across your systems either at .config/ and/or /etc/* folder.

There are already systems designed to fix this issue, such as the distro NixOs where your whole system is declared on a couple of files that reside at you /etc/nixos/*, making your system easily replicable at any compatible machine. The problem with this is that not all piece of software is fully compatible with nix configuration system, so you will need to find a workaround for that.

In my case, I’m running 2 machines running the same Arch distro and I keep my dotfiles stored at my dotfiles repo, thing is everytime I need to update my dotfiles on the main repo I have to manually copy every configuration I made into the repo and then commit, making this a hard labor at large scale.

So, what is needed for solving this?

You have to make a system where:

1. You can easily recover and restore your config files
2. You need to make it accesible for the user via GUI or CLI
3. You need to define a system where the manager knows where to look up for the files

This can easily be done by almost any programming language out there, even a single bash file.

What are my technical decisions for this?

1. I will implement a file configuration for the repo so the software knows where to look for the configs with a table-like system
2. It will be a CLI tool so users can just tool --restore or tool -recover to get/set their dotfiles fast
3. I will use rust because it’s what I’m familiar with

Why not use a simple install.sh file?

As a said earlier, you may want to keep your files synched, not reinstall all your system from scratch. I only see the install.sh file as a form to install the whole system at once, like caelestia-shell does.

The next post will be the actual coding. lol.