June 18, 2026
Symlink drama hits home
Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi
One writer dumped file-link chaos for a calmer setup, and the comments turned into a dotfile civil war
TLDR: The writer switched from GNU Stow to chezmoi after file-link confusion across multiple Macs became a constant headache. In the comments, readers turned it into a full-on showdown, with some calling chezmoi the first setup they didn’t quit and others pushing rival tools or wildly custom systems instead.
A programmer’s breakup with GNU Stow — a tool for scattering little shortcut links to settings files across computers — has sparked a surprisingly juicy identity crisis in the comments. The big confession from the article is simple: managing personal settings across three Macs became a mess. Changes made on one laptop would silently show up in the shared setup, old edits came back from the dead, and setting up a fresh machine meant deleting files by hand and hoping nothing exploded. Enter chezmoi, which copies files into one master folder instead of relying on live links, and suddenly the author is feeling organized, deliberate, and weirdly peaceful.
But the real entertainment is the crowd reaction. One commenter basically delivered the strongest endorsement possible: they’d tried Stow “five or six times” and kept abandoning it, while chezmoi somehow survived their ADHD attention span boss fight. Others were much less swoony. One person flat-out said chezmoi’s naming style and templates just do not click, and used the moment to wave the flag for Nix and Home Manager instead. Another casually dropped “I use yadm” like a rival contestant entering the villa. And then things got gloriously extra: one reader bragged they rebuilt an entire dream Linux desktop with Ansible, while another said they simply rsync their whole home directory to laptops and declare anything made there “ephemeral,” which is the kind of chaotic confidence comment sections were invented for.
So yes, this is a story about dotfiles — tiny personal settings files — but the mood is pure fandom drama: Stow loyalists, chezmoi converts, Nix evangelists, and one-person operating systems all fighting for the crown.
Key Points
- •The author migrated dotfile management from GNU Stow to Chezmoi after symlink-based workflows became difficult to manage across three Macs.
- •Stow worked well for single-machine use, but on multiple devices it caused direct write-through edits, dirty git working trees, and repository conflicts.
- •Bootstrapping new Macs with Stow was cumbersome because existing files such as `~/.zprofile` and `~/.gitconfig` had to be deleted manually before linking.
- •Chezmoi stores dotfiles in a git-backed source directory at `~/.local/share/chezmoi`, using filename conventions such as `dot_`, `private_`, and `.tmpl`.
- •The author prefers Chezmoi because `chezmoi apply` writes real files instead of symlinks, making the source directory the single source of truth and keeping repository changes explicit.