managing-dotfiles_skill

Overview

This skill manages personal dotfiles using yadm (Yet Another Dotfiles Manager). It covers pulling remote changes, resolving merge conflicts, committing and pushing updates, modifying tracked configuration files, and maintaining the yadm-managed work tree in $HOME. Use it for personal dotfiles only; work-specific dotfiles are handled separately.

How this skill works

It inspects the yadm repository and the work tree by running yadm commands such as yadm status, yadm ls-files, and yadm diff to determine tracked files and current changes. For edits, the workflow is: locate the relevant tracked file, modify it, stage with yadm add, commit with a clear message, and push with yadm push. For merges, resolve conflict markers, stage resolved files, and complete the merge with yadm commit.

When to use it

• Pull and integrate upstream dotfile changes: yadm pull
• Make changes to shell, editor, terminal, or git configs tracked by yadm
• Add new dotfiles to tracking or stop tracking files without deleting them
• Resolve merge conflicts after a pull or merge
• Run or debug pre-commit hooks before committing
• Bootstrap a new system with yadm bootstrap

Best practices

• Start by running yadm status and yadm ls-files to understand current state
• Keep commits focused and descriptive, e.g., 'Update tmux to enable mouse support'
• Run pre-commit hooks (yadm enter pre-commit run --all-files) and fix issues before committing
• Use yadm add -u to stage all modified tracked files when making bulk tweaks
• Avoid including AI or Co-Authored-By headers in commit metadata
• When stopping tracking, use yadm rm --cached <file> to preserve the local copy

Example use cases

• Enable a new editor setting: find settings.json under tracked files, edit, yadm add, commit, push
• Add a new shell function to .config/fish/functions and start tracking it with yadm add
• Resolve merge conflicts after pulling remote changes by editing conflict markers, staging, and committing
• Run the bootstrap sequence on a new machine with yadm bootstrap to install dependencies
• Remove sensitive keys from tracking using yadm rm --cached and update pre-commit to detect secrets