[sophacles]

(n)vim for example: my dotfiles don't vendor the handful of plugins i use, they just include the directives to install those with plugin manager.

I generally use a makefile + stow to handle my dotfiles and home-dir setup. Each program has an entry in this Makefile - most of them are very simple, I keep a list of programs who's dots need to be in ~, and another for ~/.config/ and using make's variable expansion they just get a stow target.

For things like the above example (nvim):

   nvim: nvim_alert_install nvim_stow
 $(shell echo "PackerSync\nqall" | nvim -es )

This also allows me to not just copy preference, but provision a bunch of stuff that's invariant across machines (e.g. what i have installed via rustup, go install, etc).