NOTE dotfiles are in the dotfiles branch.

The key idea is really simple: make $HOME the git work-tree. The normal way of doing this would be to do a git init in your $HOME, but that would totally mess up git commands if you have other repositories in your $HOME (also, you probably don't want your entire $HOME in a git repo). So, instead, we will create a dummy folder and initialize a bare repository (essentially a git repo with no working directory) in there. All git commands will be run with our dummy as the git directory, but $HOME as the work directory. -- Anand Iyer.

TEMPDOTFILES=$(mktemp -d)

# clone repo to a temporary location
git clone -b dotfiles --single-branch --separate-git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles.git https://github.com/sed-i/dotfiles.git $TEMPDOTFILES


# sync between temporary location and $HOME, just in case some files already exist
rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude '.git' $TEMPDOTFILES/. $HOME/

# clean up
rm -r $TEMPDOTFILES

# add handy alias to `.bashrc` / `.zshrc`
alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles.git --work-tree=$HOME'

# do not show untracked files
dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no