a little bit lost with dotfiles structurei

[Shmerlard]

Hi, so i have the my dotfiles direcotry and so far i've use bare git method where i just use symlinks.
my dotfiles structure goes like ~/dotfiles where i have ~/dotfiles/nvim , ~/dotfiles/hypr and so on.

and i know that some tools like stow needs the structure to be the same so i'll have to organize stuff like ~/dotfiles/.config/nvim. and i dont want it.

so can i still use chezmoi?
and if so, do i just use chezmoi -S ~/dotfiles init?
becuase if i do then how do i tell chezmoi to copy from ~/dotfiles/nvim to ~/dotfiles/.config/nvim?
and isnt it better to just symlink instead of copy?

one of the reasons that i want to use chezmoi is because i use pretty much the same configuration on 2 different machines. but some files need to be different like monitor.conf for hyprland.

[twpayne]

my dotfiles structure goes like ~/dotfiles where i have ~/dotfiles/nvim , ~/dotfiles/hypr and so on.

and i know that some tools like stow needs the structure to be the same so i'll have to organize stuff like ~/dotfiles/.config/nvim. and i dont want it.

chezmoi is different to Stow. With chezmoi, the structure of your dotfiles in your dotfiles repo exactly matches the structure of your dotfiles in your home directory.

and isnt it better to just symlink instead of copy?

one of the reasons that i want to use chezmoi is because i use pretty much the same configuration on 2 different machines. but some files need to be different like monitor.conf for hyprland.

You answer your own question here. Symlinks only work when the dotfile is identical on all machines, but often you need slightly different dotfiles on different machines.

I recommend reading the following FAQ entries:

• https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/manage-machine-to-machine-differences/
• https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/frequently-asked-questions/design/#why-doesnt-chezmoi-use-symlinks-like-gnu-stow