How to Turn a Custom Terminal Setup into Portable Dotfiles with chezmoi

This article provides a detailed guide on turning a custom terminal setup into portable dotfiles using chezmoi. It explains the pitfalls of treating dotfiles as random backups or full home directory mirrors, and presents a better approach: defining the terminal environment as a small, reproducible system. The tutorial covers using chezmoi for dotfile state management, Homebrew Bundle for package manifests, and a scoped public repository for safe-to-restore files. It includes practical examples for zsh, Ghostty, Starship, and other configs, emphasizing tracking authored files and excluding secrets, history, and caches.