what-is-symly-useful-for.adoc

What is Symly useful for?

Symly has been created to address the synchronization issue of users' configuration files between different machines. But Symly is not a synchronization tool, nor is limited to dealing with user configuration files also known as dotfiles.

Symly is not a synchronization tool.

There are many synchronization tools out there, how is Symly different?

Symly is not a synchronization tool. Symly is a tool allowing you to centralize a list of files and directories and create symbolic links to them. You can then use your preferred synchronization tool whether it is a service like Dropbox, or Tresorit, or a more developer/versioning-oriented tool like git.

Why create symbolic links and not copy the files over?

The main use case of Symly is about user configuration files. The particularity of those files is that they are not read-only files. They are written to by a wide variety of tools like your preferred text-editor, scripts appending to your .bashrc, or other tools like git config --global, …​ Using a file copy would destroy such updates every time you want to deploy your centralized files.

Using symbolic links allows for the following characteristics:

• Seamless integration: by using symbolic links every change to tracked files will be immediately available in the repository, no matter what tool made those changes.

• Synchronization/Versioning ready: You can use any versioning or synchronization tool for the repositories. Gain instant benefits from your favorite tools for backups, diffs, and rollbacks for your files.

Is Symly limited to user configuration files?

No, Symly is not limited to creating links in your user home folder. The user home folder is however a common use case for the directory but any other directory can be used.