Igor is a very simple dotfile management system accompanied by a script that registers files to be tracked, and handles moving them into the same folder the script is located. Additionally, Igor will also create a symbolic link to the file's original location.

When using Igor to track your dotfiles you should use igor -add file_name to start tracking that file. Every time you start or stop tracking a file you should commit the changes to this repository. You should also commit any changes made to tracked files in order for them to be replicated across your systems. Once a change is made and pushed to github, from any other systems where you are using Igor to track your dotfiles you can git pull from inside the repository folder to update your files with the most up to date revision.

For Igor to be most effective, the best way to setup your system is to have an alias for Igor in your shell profile or $PATH.

Assuming this repository was cloned to $HOME/igor

echo "igor=$HOME/igor.sh" >> .bashrc # if you use bash
# or
echo "igor=$HOME/igor.sh" >> .zshrc # if you use zsh

Once Igor is in your $PATH you can start tracking your dotfiles. To do so, simply tell igor to add it to the list of files being tracked.

igor --add my_file.txt
# now the file called my_file.txt was moved to $HOME/igor
# and a symlink pointo to it was created in the current folder where this file
# is located
# The file $HOME/igor/tracked-files now has an entry for my_file=/current/folder

When you want to restore your dotfiles to a new system, or fix issues with the existing symlinks you can tell igor to restore the files. Igor will create symbolic links to the files existing in the version controlled folder where the script is running from. Igor uses the tracked-files list to determine where the symlinks should point to.

igor --restore

When you decide you no longer want to track a specific file, you can simply tell igor to remove it from the list of tracked files. Igor will remove the symlink to the tracked file, and move the file from the version controlled folder into the original location of that file according to what was saved in tracked-files.

igor --remove my_file.txt
# at this point `igor` has removed the symlink to this file and moved the file
# back to its original location.