I have tried a custom linking script, Ansible, and stow. The best I have found is to just use a bare git repo based off of: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

The idea is to make an alias that runs git so that it treats your home directory as a git repository and you can directly commit them.

I would recommend bypassing that article's `config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no` setting and setting a `~/.gitignore`. This way, git will never tinker with your home directory if you accidentally run the wrong command.

So the complete list of setup commands is:

    # Only needs to be done the first time
    cat >~/.gitignore<<'EOF'
    *
    !/.bashrc
    !/.zshrc
    EOF

    # On subsequent runs
    git clone --bare ssh://git/cfg.git "${HOME}/.cfg"
    function config() {
       git --git-dir="${HOME}/.cfg/" --work-tree="${HOME}" "${@}"
    }
    config checkout -- ~/.gitignore
    config reset ~
    config checkout -- ~
    config submodule update --init --recursive --remote

One caveat is adding files in subdirectories (`~/. config/...`), but just requires changes in your gitignore