New tools tried out: autofs and chezmoi

Among the list of cool tools I discovered and tried out lately on my Linux boxes are autofs and chezmoi.

autofs solves the problems of network shares that are unavailable when your machine boots. The service automatically mounts network shares (nfs and Samba are of interest to me) when you access them. The Arch wiki page for autofs has a good explanation of how to set up autofs along with examples. I got it running in a couple of minutes. The end result is that things just work.

Dotfile management could have been managed with git alone, but having to manually add so many configs for unique machines is too much work. I’m not disciplined enough yet to do that. chezmoi lets you simply add config files or symblinks to them to a git. It also has auto-commit options and that makes things just a little more seamless. Since using chezmoi, I’ve better synchronized my dotfiles across machines - so I have familiar and identical setups everywhere. There are some complex configurations I am yet to get to, like Neovim. I want to learn templates better too, and how to handle secrets. Anyway, it’s been fun using this tool and it’s satisfying each time I run a chezmoi update -v && chezmoi apply.