Day-to-day usage

This repo is chezmoi's source directory, cloned by bootstrap.sh to chezmoi's default location (~/.local/share/chezmoi, unless $CHEZMOI_SOURCE_DIR says otherwise). The dotfiles alias defined in .zsh_aliases is just a shorter name for the chezmoi binary:

alias dotfiles='chezmoi'

Common commands, run from anywhere (chezmoi always knows where its source directory is):

dotfiles diff                    # see what `apply` would change
dotfiles apply                   # apply the source state to $HOME
dotfiles edit ~/.zshrc           # edit the source file for a target, by target path
dotfiles cd                      # cd into the source directory (i.e. this repo) to edit/commit/push directly
dotfiles add ~/.config/foo/bar   # start tracking a new file — adds it under home/ with the right dot_/executable_ name
dotfiles re-add                  # pull local edits to a target back into the source state

Unlike the old bare-repo config status, chezmoi never scans $HOME for untracked files at all — it only ever looks at the exact paths declared under home/ in this repo, so there's no untracked-file noise to filter and no equivalent of config add -A to avoid.

Updates to installed tools are handled by topgrade rather than a dotfiles alias — run topgrade directly. It comes from the Brewfile on macOS; on Linux install.sh installs it via the package manager when available (Fedora/Arch package it, Debian/Ubuntu largely don't), falling back to pipx on Debian/Ubuntu.

Machine-local overrides

Three files are sourced if present and are deliberately not tracked, so each machine can differ without chezmoi ever seeing them — they aren't part of the source state, so chezmoi apply/chezmoi diff never touch them:

File	For
~/.gitconfig.local	git identity ([user] name/email)
~/.zsh_aliases.local	aliases with machine specifics — NAS addresses, uids, mount points
~/.zshrc.local	anything else shell-local

~/.gitconfig.local is the one you need on a fresh box: without it, git commit fails with "Please tell me who you are".