Here’s how Tom Payne describes his project:

chezmoi is a popular dotfile manager (currently over 4.5K stars on GitHub and increasing quickly). chezmoi helps you get your prefered environment synchronized across multiple machines (e.g. your home desktop, your work laptop, and a temporary development container in the cloud) while easily coping with differences from machine to machine and keeping all your secrets safe either with your password manager or encryption. Using chezmoi feels very much like using git (and indeed it builds on git). chezmoi is easy to install, quick to start with, runs everywhere, and scales from managing a handful of files on one machine to complex multi-machine set-ups with hundreds of dotfiles and plugins.

Getting a new machine set up looks like:

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- init --apply <github-username>

My dotfiles “manager” is just a combination of git clone and setup.sh, but if I used many machines I’d probably reach for something more robust like this. If you’re already using a manager for yours, here’s a comparison guide of how chezmoi stacks up to other popular options.