Cstow

About

There's lots of dotfiles managers, but my favorite is GNU Stow.

It has only two problems: boring UI and no config. Cstow solves them.

Name

Constantine's GNU Stow wrapper.

Some GNU Stow Terminology

A target directory is the root of a tree in which one or more packages wish to appear to be installed.

A stow directory is the root of a tree containing separate packages in private subtrees.

Installation

Use pipx

pipx install cstow

Or pip

pip install cstow

Configuration

Set CSTOW_CONFIG_PATH to path/to/your/cstow_config.toml. Use any file name you want.

Examples

• My cstow.toml.
• More examples.

Config Contents

Cstow expands ~ and $AN_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE.

root_dir

You might set it to ~/dotfiles or $DOTFILES.

If you don't set root_dir, use absolute paths in targets_dirs.

cmd_template

You can set it to any shell command, but every variable must be used at least once.

Cstow escapes variables so don't even try shell-injecting yourself!

Variables

Default

stow --$action --no-folding --verbose --target=$target --dir=$dir . \
     2>&1 | grep --invert-match --regexp="^BUG" --regexp="^WARN"

Usage

# Get some help
cstow -h
cstow --help

# Run an action
cstow               # Default action is 'no'
cstow no            # Action is a positional argument
cstow -a no         # But flags also work
cstow --action no

# Print plain text
cstow stow -p
cstow restow --plain
cstow -p -a delete