[theshrike79]

Nah, I want my configurations to be deterministic.

I put config in dir, launch app. App should look like config.

If it doesn't it's the app's fault.

There are a limited number of applications I tolerate this behaviour from, but not many.

[pksebben]

Almost entirely with you on that, actually. But OS and other environment differences frequently demand some sort of tweaking, which I absolutely do not want to do by hand if I've done it before.

[theshrike79]

Chezmoi can do conditional templating on config files, which is super nice.

But it's always better when the application itself is cross platform and uses just a single config file.

(Just setting all of the knobs on macOS is a massive hassle and only part of them can be automated in a deterministic way...)

[pksebben]

It's about time I started using a dotfile manager that I didn't make entirely myself - thanks for the recommendation.

For more and more of the cross-platform headaches, I've actually found myself treating the OS as more of a virtual host, and spending the plurality of my time configuring layers that run in it (modify .zshrc where it can do the work of iterm/wezterm, if it can be done in .emacs then do it there).

I get the feeling that I'm not far off shipping personal nix containers around, but there's still a little too much friction between having containers work and working on the OS itself.

[theshrike79]

I spent a long time messing about with different solutions and Chezmoi is the one that's least confusing for me and fits the way I think the best.

I've been using it for years and didn't touch the templating until this spring actually, I just had if statements in my setup bash scripts =P