.dotfiles

I am creating my dot files following this tutorial. It successfully works for emacs.d.

Since I am using NixOS, I tried doing exactly the same steps with symlink creation for the configuration.nix file. Thus, I did:

1 - On terminal:

I have often used this approach to dot file management in git, where I create a bare git repo "~/.dotfiles" and us $HOME as a work tree. With the shell alias config I can then add dot files from the home dir quickly (as in config add, config commit

Question

Is there a way to define patterns to not pull files from the git server on a git clone or git fetch? This may be called a "reverse git ignore".

Problem

What I have is a repository of dotfiles and I want to have a readme in the root of the project that is named README.md. With this file GitHub can display it with nice formatting.

As the repo is to be checked out in the user's home folder on a *NIX machine, all the dotfiles will be hidden as intended, but the README.md will not and that is not desired.

So I do not want the README.md to be pulled when the repo is cloned. How to achieve that?

Alternative solution

If the above desired result is not possible, can the README.md be hidden or obscured in the home folder through some other method?

Example of problem

If it helps, here is the dotfiles repository I am working on.

Below is some necessary context for understanding my questions (my shell is /bin/bash by the way):

The home(~) folder in my MacBook Pro is getting heavily cluttered by dotfiles. Is there any way I can neatly organise them.

I would like to group related dotfiles together(.eg. .bashrc .bash_profile .bash_history --> .bash folder). And all the dotfolders into a single directory like .config or .dotfiles.

How can I implement this without breaking anything if possible?

I've added a README to my dotfile folder and since I'm managing each package with stow I'd like to ignore that. From documentation I've read that by default stow uses a preset list which includes README files. Now, this doesn't seem to work. I've also tried adding a .stow-global-ignore but same error. Even forcing with stow -nv --ignore='README.md' * leads to nothing.

I'm rather new to submodules and git, but I have been using them to include all of my plugins for tmux and vim, etc on my own dotfiles repository on github.

It doesn't happen that often, but sometimes when I do a pull on my dotfiles repository, many of my submodule files have changed. For example, during my most recent git fetch, I get something like this (removed a couple plugin updates to make it shorter):

I manage my dotfiles using git in a bare repository. See article by Harfang Perch for details on this method.

It works great but I'd like to add a README.md to the root of the repository on github.

How do I add a README.md to the github repository root directory but not have that file show up in my home directories?

If I push a README.md to github then delete the README.md in my home directory this will result in

Can someone tell me how I can recover from this error? I runs emacs 28.0.50 with spacemacs 0.300.0@28.0.50 on Ubuntu 19.10.

Here is the backtrace from emacs --debug-init