Experienced Devs

Had a homebrew Git setup for ages and recently started using Chezmoi. It's only been a few weeks, but so far it's been pretty great!

What I really like about chezmoi is how it can retrieve secrets stored on Bitwarden. Your git history is clean of secrets but you can have them referenced on your dotfiles.

I use Chezmoi but I have to point out some of its downfalls vs. other dotfile managers, particularly if someone is looking to migrate to it.

• Go's templating lib is incredibly unergonomic.
• Identifying file perms and visibility in by special naming convention is pretty gross. Also makes it more difficult to migrate to another solution.
• If you're deleting files, you need to remember to do it through chezmoi remove .... You can't just rm them from your dotfiles directory, because chezmoi does not sync state; it simply applies what's currently in your repo.
• Handling multiple systems through .chezmoiignore ends up being overly verbose and unintuitive vs. the approach used by other dotfile managers

Despite these gripes I still use it because deployment via a single binary is convenient, and there's enough control through the generated config file + system info to handle multiple kinds of deployments sort-of-sensibly (see point 4 above).

I adore chezmoi