Dots

A simple and interactive dotfiles manager for organizing and managing your configuration files across systems.

Overview

Dots helps you manage your dotfiles by providing two main workflows:

• Collect: Gather dotfiles from your home directory into a centralized location
• Link: Deploy dotfiles from a source directory to your home directory using symlinks

Installation

npm install -g @n1kben/dots

Usage

Collect dotfiles

Collect dotfiles from your home directory into a specified destination:

dots collect ~/dotfiles

This command will:

• Scan your home directory for files and directories
• Present an interactive checkbox to select which dotfiles to collect
• Move selected files/directories to the destination
• Create symlinks back to their original locations
• Handle directories by either symlinking the entire directory or processing files individually

Link dotfiles

Deploy dotfiles from a source directory to your home directory:

dots link ~/dotfiles

This command will:

• Read files and directories from the source location
• Create symlinks in your home directory pointing to the source files
• Prompt for confirmation before creating directory symlinks
• Skip existing files to prevent overwriting

Ignoring Files

You can create a .dotsignore file in your home directory to specify files and directories that should be ignored during the collect process. The syntax follows standard gitignore patterns:

# Comments start with #
node_modules/
*.log
.DS_Store
temp/

Each line specifies a pattern to ignore. Use # for comments and standard glob patterns for matching files and directories.