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I'm curious about, specifically, which files you (and the sibling commenter) want to manage outside of the home directory. Is it OS package-manager configs?

This is highly dependent on distro, but for any use-cases where editing /etc/ is the recommendation, I have found that either:

(a) It's a development environment thing (e.g. httpd vhosts) & thus I see it as quite separate to "my dotfiles" (a personal machine env thing): I try my best to manage dev env stuff from project-specific repos wherever I can (i.e. a bash script to dispatch required local /etc/ changes in a repo "./scripts" dir or similar), or otherwise if it's a more significant set of configs, Ansible.

(b) It's a specific app that is recommending doing things the "Wrong Way™". There's often a workaround to get it to use $HOME or $XDG.

(c) It's OS package configs. I've found that things like repo & key installs are well suited to chezmoi run_ scripts. For anything more advanced or esoteric, I guess that may be an exception.



regular config files in ~/Library/Application Support/ Sure there are (b) workarounds, including chezmoi templates and run_ scripts with symlinks, but that's cumbersome (and some issues were only resolved recently)


Not sure what you mean? That is in your home directory...


You're right, I confused it with a different issue requiring symlinking "workarounds"


On macOS I often have the need to place stuff in /Library.


What kind of stuff? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never once had to touch /Library manually.


Launch Daemons, mostly


these go in ~/Library/LaunchAgents


Not if they need to run as root




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