Dotter is a dotfile manager and templater.
Dotfiles are configuration files that usually live in the home directory and start with a dot. Often times, it is desirable to have a backup of all the configurations on your system, which is why a lot of users have their dotfiles saved in a git repository, then symlinking them to their target locations using ln -s.
However, there are several issues with that barebones approach:
- Hard to keep track of what comes from where once you have more than a handful of dotfiles
- Tedious to setup on a new machine - you need to manually create every single link
- No real way to handle differences between machines - say you want the battery meter on your bar to not appear on your desktop machine
Dotter aims to solve all those problems by providing a flexible configuration and automatic templating or symlinking to the target locations.