I spent some time evaluating all the available dotfile managers a few months ago and settled on chezmoi: https://www.chezmoi.io/ https://www.chezmoi.io/ I had

I spent some time evaluating all the available dotfile managers a few months ago and settled on chezmoi: https://www.chezmoi.io/ https://www.chezmoi.io/ I had initially been turned off when I first encountered it, because it seemed overkill for (what appeared to me) a simple task. But the problem of managing a relatively small number of dotfiles across a relatively small number of machines with small differences between them and keeping them up to date proved to be MUCH more complex than I imagined. Copy things around by hand, and then later distributing them via source control got hairy very quickly. I finally realized all those features were absolutely necessary to manage things sanely, and once I took some time to learn how to do things with chezmoi, I have never looked back. In addition to its docs, I found the authors dotfiles repo on Github to be a great help on how to set things up: https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles (FWIW: I have never used NixOS/Home Manager, so I can't really speak to how it compares to chezmoi.)