Using GNU Stow on macOS to manage your dotfiles

The idea behind Stow is simple. You have a dotfiles repository and you create directories for each package (util) you need a config for. In each directory, you keep version-controlled config files. And you use Stow to apply your symlinks.

dotfiles/
  vim/
    .vimrc
  git/
    .gitconfig
  zsh/
    .zshrc

Then each can be managed independently:

stow vim
stow git
stow zsh

Here’s how it all looks like for me:

brew install stow
git clone https://github.com/guilsa/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
stow --simulate --verbose=2 --target="$HOME" vim

If the output looks right, run:

stow --verbose=2 --target="$HOME" vim