From Arch Mayhem to Dotfile Nirvana: How I Stumbled into stow (Thanks, Mischa)

After a few… let’s say enthusiastic iterations of installing Arch Linux (we don’t count installs, we count character development), I finally started piecing together something resembling a usable system. This wasn’t just an OS install this was a rite of passage. The kind of journey where you emerge from your tiling window manager blinking into the light of a fully functional system, dotfiles in one hand, terminal in the other.

The catalyst for this chaos? None other than Mischa yes, that Mischa. You know the one: the guru of minimalism, the k8s whisperer, the Zettelkasten diplomat. After watching some of his workflows and config walkthroughs I thought, “How hard could it be?”

Narrator: It was very hard.

Once the dust settled from another glorious pacstrap and I stopped yelling at grub, (Mischa recommends systemd-boot and rightfully so, I changed to it on my next iteration. Anyhow, I was left with a mess of personalized configs (not to mention Hyprland configs) scattered all over ~/.config, .bashrc, .zshrc, .nvim, and half a dozen symlink experiments gone rogue.

And that’s when I met her…stow.

A tool so simple, yet so elegant, I wanted to slap my past self for not using it sooner.

What the heck is stow?

GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager. It’s designed to help you manage your dotfiles by creating symlinks from a central repo to your home directory (or wherever you need them). No more script spaghetti or juggling lns like a clown at a shell prompt.

How it works (in plain English)

Imagine this:

You’ve got a repo of dotfiles:

dotfiles/

├── bash/

│ └── .bashrc

├── nvim/

│ └── .config/nvim/init.lua

├── zsh/

│ └── .zshrc

stow bash zsh nvim

And like magic, stow symlinks everything right into place.