There are more than a few systems to manage dotfiles (examples 1, 2, and 3). I needed a system that would be compatible with Windows (WSL), Mac, and Linux. I wanted to share some of the functionality between all OSes/systems, but I also wanted to keep some configurations/aliases to be OS specific and system specific. Unlike the above solutions, I didn't want to install extra software just for this task. I wanted to automatically have my my most recent changes on any machine, and I didn't want to manually copy (cp) files to the expected destination directories. I settled on a simple private git repo + symlink solution. Below I've individually outlined how I implemented each feature of my system in the hope that others can pull each feature they want in ad-hoc.

I put individual system configurations in a named file (ex: personal_wsl), while keeping OS specific configurations in separate files (windowsspecific, macspecific, and linuxspecific). Then for any aliases I wanted to share across all OSes/systems I would place them in a commonzshrc file. At shell startup my .zshrc file would be sourced, so I use that as a simple entry point for a specific machine, and as such I don't include each individual .zshrc file in my dotfiles repo.

Thus for a Windows, Mac and Linux system the .zshrc would respectively be:

System specific source ...

source ~/dotfiles/windowsspecific source ~/dotfiles/commonzshrc

source ~/dotfiles/machinespecific

System specific source ...

source ~/dotfiles/macspecific source ~/dotfiles/commonzshrc

source ~/dotfiles/machinespecific

System specific source ...

source ~/dotfiles/linuxspecific source ~/dotfiles/commonzshrc

source ~/dotfiles/machinespecific

Auto-pull

commonzshrc:

alias dotpull="git -C ~/dotfiles pull" alias dotpush="git -C ~/dotfiles push" alias dotcommit="git -C ~/dotfiles add -A && git -C ~/dotfiles commit -m "Default common commit message"" alias dotcommitandpush="dotcommit && dotpush" alias dotcap="dotcommit && dotpush"

SSH agent initialize

{ eval ssh-agent; ssh-add; } &>/dev/null

Try and pull the most recent version of the files

This should give errors if it hits a merge conflict

{ git -C ~/dotfiles pull } 1>/dev/null

I still have to manually push any changes (dotcap), but in practice that hasn't been a big issue.