Top all-time · #2717
Brandon Invergo
Personal blog · brandon.invergo.net/newsprogrammingdesign
Brandon Invergo's personal blog at brandon.invergo.net covers programming and design. Since 2013, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Brandon Invergo's 2012 post on managing dotfiles with GNU Stow, a symlink farm manager used with git. Many commenters cite it as the starting point for their own dotfile setups.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Adaptation, Algorithms and Ambience
Most-linked posts?
- Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)17 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2013-09-05
- Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-08-28
- Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-27
What Hacker News says?
+1 for this method! Good post. I originally learned about this through: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Tmux and Vim – better together”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012) as a story · 203 points
HN discussionFor anyone interested in this topic, [0] contains the best setup I've found for storing dotfiles in a git repo, then linking them with GNU Stow. Steps are just: git clone https://github.com/me/my-dotfile-repo cd my-dotfile-repo stow --target=$HOME zsh stow --target=$HOME vim ... Elegant, cross-platform, easy to remember. [0]: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “A Good Vimrc (2014)”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles as a story · 188 points
HN discussionI do this as well! I have this repo [0] at ~/cfg, then I symlink what I need [1] as an init script. My end goal is to be able to run a single script and get everything [2] set up on a new machine (I change machines somewhat frequently and I got the manual process to under 45 minutes, so there's room for improvement). More on setting up Macs [3]. There is also GNU Stow [4] that does something similar, and probably be…
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “'Using Emacs' Series”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles as a story · 149 points
HN discussionI use stow, which has some nice advantages vs managing symlinks yourself https://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-t...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage dotfiles (2013) as a story · 84 points
HN discussionIf on *nix, gnu stow + git is the holy grail (imo). https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012) as a story · 71 points
HN discussionIf you're managing dotfiles with Make (which I attempted once...) then may I direct you to GNU Stow instead? It's much easier to manage a bunch of files centrally and just symlink to them all: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make”Submitted Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013) as a story · 61 points
HN discussionA few years ago I read a blog post [0] on using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles, I loved the idea and it inspired me to create xdot, a minimalist dotfiles manager [1] which I have been using ever since. [0]: https://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-t... [1]: https://github.com/malobre/xdot
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “GNU Stow needs a co-maintainer”Submitted Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf anyone is interested in setting up multiple platform dotfiles or more complicated setup, GNU stow [1] is just pure genius. It's a very simple approach which works very well for me. It's described in this blog post: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to... [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFor dotfiles, a good workflow seem to have a git/hg repo and combine it with GNU stow. http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Versioning Your Home Directory”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGNU stow and git, per this tutorial: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Ask HN: What do you use to manage dotfiles?”Submitted Anti Web Design Manifesto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell, this is what you get when you rely on non-free software. But hopefully Elsevier can at least put some decent software engineers on it to make it somewhat less excruciating to use, e.g. http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-Mendeley....
Comment linking /news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-Mendeley.html
on “Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley”Submitted Anti-Web-Design Manifesto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI am using GNU stow [1] to share more than just Vim (though you could just do Vim) and it's been easy-breezy. ----- [1]: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “VimSwitch: Use Your Vim Settings Everwhere”Submitted Anti Web design manifesto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionsource control + GNU stow GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place. For example, /usr/local/bin could contain symlinks to files within /usr/local/stow/emacs/bin, /usr/local/stow/perl/bin etc., and likewise recursively for any other subdirectories such as .../share…
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Ask HN: How do you share your personal setup over different computers?”Submitted Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionstow is pretty great http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to...
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Ask HN: I'm declaring dotfile bankruptcy. How to start from scratch effectively?”Submitted Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI actually version control my config files ( https://github.com/tombert/dotfiles ) after reading this tutorial: http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to... Obviously you should change that to git instead of CVS.
Comment linking /news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
on “Ask HN: Turn my home directory into a Git repo?”Submitted Revision-control your dotfiles with GNU Stow (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
