Power User Tools

Managing configs with vcsh and mr

vcsh [1] is a utility that allows you to create multiple git repositories to store configuration files in your home directory. It solves the problem of having to use symlinks, and is a very nice tool. It works well with another tool named mr [2] that allows you to synchronize all of your config repos with a single command.

Common Tasks

Adding new repo

Let say you want to add a repo for tracking your zsh configuration. First, create a gitignore file for the repo so you can just do git add .

 > vim ~/.gitignore.d/zsh
 ...

Add the following lines

 /*
 !/.zsh

Now create the repository and push to a remote

 > vcsh init zsh    # create the repo
 > vcsh zsh add .   # add all files not masked by ~/.gitignore.d/zsh
 > vcsh zsh commit  # commit files
 > vcsh zsh remote add origin ssh://user@host/repo/with/write/access  # create remote repo
 > vcsh zsh push --set-upstream origin master # push to the origin and setup tracking

Next, add the repository to the mr configuration.

 > vim ~/.config/mr/
...

Add the following lines