These are the dotfiles of the Starship Caleb Hearth. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new software, to seek out new configurations and new customizations, to boldly go where hopefully lots of folks have gone before.
These dotfiles use GNU Stow combined with a Makefile to manage symlinks and to combine configurations from various packages.
Stow packages are directories that mirror the home directory structure. Their contents are symlinked into $HOME by stow via make.
At least the base package is required, and other packages can be added as desired by adding them to the included variable in Makefile. bin is not intended as a package, it just contains some tools for managing the dotfiles themselves.
.stow-global-ignore specified file patterns relative to package roots that stow should ignore when linking packages.
Certain of these files are further handled by Makefile.
Each package can include a Brewfile with Homebrew dependencies. The Makefile concatenates all of them into a single generated Brewfile at $XDG_DATA_HOME/dotfiles/Brewfile and runs brew bundle install against it.
Similarly, all included packages' Gemfiles will be combined into $XDG_DATA_HOME/dotfiles/Gemfile and bundle install will be run against it. This is useful for packages that install Ruby gems, but I've been moving away from this pattern in favor of setting up .config/mise/config.<package>.toml files that are able to manage gems and other dependencies (bun, node, pip, swift, etc.) in a more flexible way. Those can be activated by included them in $MISE_ENV, which is easier to adjust on a per-project basis and allows for version differences.
We could do this by creating <package>/.local/share/dotfiles/Brewfile.d/<package> to simplify the Makefile step (and the same for Gemfile), but the ergonomics are much nicer with <package>/{Brewfile,Gemfile} and we'd still need the combination step.
Because Rectangle, a tiling window tool, doesn't follow symlinks for its preference file, it is ignored by stow and hard-linked by Makefile.
Packages can pin Homebrew formulae to specific versions via a local caleb/pinned tap. See our homebrew-pinned tap's README for details.