To get the whole repo, run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/freestyl3r/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
git submodule init
git submodule update
You can manually copy the files / create symlinks into the corresponding locations or you can use a tool to help you with that.
Stow (and it's fork XStow) is a symlink farm manager.
Stow has the concept of packages, where a package is a folder that includes an installation image.
An installation image is the layout of files & folders that you want to be symlinked as is in a target directory.
Take for example the tmux package in this repo. It contains .tmux.conf and bin/uptime.sh.
If we install the tmux package in our home folder, we will have symlinks looking like this:
~/.tmux.conf -> dotfiles/tmux/.tmux.conf
~/bin/uptime.sh -> ../dotfiles/tmux/bin/uptime.sh
If you want to read up on how Stow deals with multiple packages that include a common folder, check the official documentation.
TLDR version: It just works.
Using Stow in it's simplest form is as easy as:
cd dotfiles
stow tmux
Symlinks will be created in the current's working directory parent folder. If you opted to clone the repository in your home folder, you don't need anything else.
You can explicitly specify a target directory like so:
stow -t ~ tmux
Stow will not overwrite files already present in your filesystem. If a collision is found while creating the symlinks, everything will be reverted and no changes will be made.
Use the verbose flag for more info:
stow -v tmux
Stow provides a flag to quickly remove all symlinks installed by a package:
stow -v -D tmux
sound not an actual package. It is a folder containing 2 packages. You have to cd in it and then run the following command:
stow -t /etc mpd
Another way of doing that without entering the dotfiles/sound directory, is to specify the path in stow.
The first example assumes that you are in the dotfiles directory. The second one can be run from anywhere.
stow -d sound -t /etc mpd
stow -d ~/dotfiles/sound -t ~ alsa