Dotfiles are used to configure command line applications and reside in the user's home directory. Either in their own (mostly hidden) application directory (~/.weechat/*.conf), in the home directory (~/.bashrc), or in a directory stored for all applications (~/.config/).

Your dotfiles will most likely be the longest project you ever work on. For this reason, it is worthwhile to organize your dotfiles project in a disciplined manner for maintainability and extensibility.

It is worth keeping your configuration under version control for several reasons. Keeping a history of your changes allows you to safely experiment with new configurations, revert bad changes, and review the details of past changes. When working on multiple systems, choosing to use a version control system is a no-brainer — version control helps you keep your dotfiles in sync while properly dealing with changes being made on different systems.

It is possible to use dedicated tools such as rcm or homesick for this purpose. These tools usually handle both versioning and installation of dotfiles, which is accomplished by using a dedicated version control system behind the scenes and providing a front end designed specifically for managing dotfiles. These tools are additional dependencies that need to be installed prior to setting up your dotfiles. They are fairly heavyweight, so I prefer to avoid external dependencies in favor of a simpler, self-contained setup. As a bonus, there is one less thing that needs to be done when setting up new systems.