Chezmoi and Git: Dotfiles Without Pretending Every Machine Is the Same

Table of Contents Table of Contents The Three States That Make Chezmoi Click Starting Small My Normal Edit, Review and Commit Loop One Repository, Different Machines Oopsie: I Edited the Real Config A Second Machine Without Surprises Secrets, Encryption and Private Repositories Sharp Edges Worth Remembering Do Not Make ~/.config Exact by Accident Source Diff and Destination Diff Are Different Updating Is Not Publishing Test the Rendered File, Not Only the Template The Command Card I Actually Need Further Reading My workstation configuration is not one file. It is fish functions and abbreviations, a Git configuration, Neovim Lua, GnuPG and SSH settings, and an Atuin configuration. It has grown over years, which is another way of saying that recreating it from memory would produce something incomplete and subtly annoying. Putting all of it in Git solves the history and distribution problem. It does not solve the deployment problem. Git does not know that dot_gitconfig belongs at…