linksym is a dotfiles management tool which acts as a wrapper around ln for creating symbolic links (symlinks) and creating a record of those symlinks in a configuration file, allowing to easily recreate those symlinks later from a single file using a simple command.

• Allows easy creation of symlinks.
• Automatically records symlinks in .linksym.yaml file
• Allow you to recreate or restore symlinks from the configuration file

• Make a dotfiles directory.
• Initialize linksym with linksym init.
• Add dotfiles to dotfiles directory with linksym add.
• Remove any unneeded dotfiles with linksym remove.
• Track changes with git.
• On another system or machine, Clone your dotfiles repo.
• Run linksym update to update the .linksym.yaml file.
• Run linksym restore <dir/path> to create it's symlink
• Run linksym source to create all symlinks from the .linksym.yaml file.
• Profit.

Make sure you have go installed on your system. Install it directly using go

go install github.com/SwayKh/linksym@latest

Or get the binary from the releases page. And put directly in your path

Uninstall linksym by running:

$ rm -f $(which linksym)

linksym init

Creates a .linksym.yaml file in the current directory This file acts as a database for storing record of symlinks. All other commands require for the .linksym.yaml file to be present and hence this command is required to be run before any other command.

linksym add [target] [destination (optional)]

Moves the file from target-path to destination-path (Or the current directory if no destination path is provided) and creates a symlinks at source pointing to destination. And records it in .linksym.yaml.

linksym record [target] [destination (optional)]

Separate command to add a symlink record to .linksym.yaml file. Skips the Moving and symlinking step of the add subcommand. Useful for creating a record of symlink paths that are already present on the system.

linksym remove [target(s)...]

Removes the symlink and restores the target file or directory to its original path and remove the record from .linksym.yaml.

linksym restore [target(s)...]

Create a symlink for the specified target(s) at their source location based on the record in .linksym.yaml.

linksym update

Updates the .linksym.yaml file in the current directory. This updates the Init directory field in .linksym.yaml file with the current directory. and updates the record name fields appropriately.

linksym source

Reads the .linksym.yaml file in the current directory and creates symlinks for each record. Useful for replicating recorded symlinks on a different system or machine.

$ linksym -h/ --help

USAGE:
  linksym [flags] [subcommand]

FLAGS:
  -h, --help
    Display this help message.
  -v
    Show verbose output.

AVAILABLE COMMANDS:
  init
    Initialize the linksym configuration file (.linksym.yaml) to hold records of symlinks.

  add [target] [destination (Optional)]
    Create a symlink for the specified path. Optionally takes a destination path for the symlink.

  record [target] [destination (Optional)]
    Creates a record of symlink in .linksym.yaml, which actually creating symlink.

  remove [target(s)...]
    Remove the symlink and restore the original file to its original path.

  restore [target(s)...]
    Create symlink for specified target(s) that has a record in .linksym.yaml configuration file.

  source
    Create all symlinks described in the .linksym.yaml configuration file.

  update
    Update the .linksym.yaml configuration file in the current directory.

I know that there are quite a few tools out there for managing dotfiles. Like all these utilities on [http://dotfiles.github.io/utilities/]. Stow and Chezmoi are famous choices for dotfiles management. But they have completely different workflows and I never got used to stow with the packages of dotfiles.

There's also mackup which backups ALL your dotfiles automatically to any file sharing/storing providers like dropbox or google-cloud. A bit overkill for my use case but be sure to have a look.

I manage my dotfiles with a simple bash script which just has ln command to link each of my dotfiles. This project was made to ease that process and make it easier to manage symlinks.

The MIT License