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technicalpickles
homesick
Ruby2011–2022
technicalpickles / homesick

homesick

Your home directory is your castle. Don't leave your dotfiles behind.

15Distinct people
16Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Your home directory is your castle. Don't leave your dotfiles behind.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:53 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year16 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-05-16 22:29:25 UTC to 2022-07-27 19:33:36 UTC.

012342011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
homesick Your home directory is your castle. Don't leave your dotfiles behind. Homesick is sorta like rip, but for dotfiles. It uses git to clone a repository containing dotfiles, and saves them in ~/.homesick. It then allows you to symlink all the dotfiles into place with a single command. We call a repository that is compatible with homesick to be a 'castle'. To act as a castle, a repository must be organized like so: Contains a 'home' directory 'home' contains any number of files and directories that begin with '.' To get started, install homesick first: gem install homesick If you're starting from scratch and don't have a castle yet, generate one: homesick generate ~/.homesick/repos/my-dotfiles This creates a new git repository with a home/ directory ready for your dotfiles. If you have a github.user set in your git config, it will also add a GitHub remote automatically. You can then track files into it: homesick track ~/.vimrc my-dotfiles Otherwise, if you already have a castle hosted somewhere, clone it: Next, you use the homesick command to clone a castle: homesick clone git://github.com/technicalpickles/pickled-vim.git Alternatively, if it's on github, there's a slightly shorter way: homesick clone technicalpickles/pickled-vim With the castle cloned, you can now link its contents into your home dir: homesick link pickled-vim You can remove symlinks anytime when you don't need them anymore homesick unlink pickled-vim If you need to add further configuration steps you can add these in a file called '.homesickrc' in the root of a castle. Once you've cloned a castle with a .homesickrc run the configuration with: homesick rc CASTLE The contents of the .homesickrc file must be valid Ruby code as the file will be executed with Ruby's eval construct. The .homesickrc is also passed the current homesick object during its execution and this is available within the .homesickrc file as the 'self' variable. As the rc operation can be destructive the command normally asks for confirmation before proceeding. You can bypass this by passing the '--force' option, for example homesick rc --force CASTLE. If you're not sure what castles you have around, you can easily list them: homesick list To pull your castle (or all castles): homesick pull --all|CASTLE To commit your castle's changes: homesick commit CASTLE To push your castle: homesick push CASTLE To open a terminal in the root of a castle: homesick cd CASTLE To open your default editor in the root of a castle (the $EDITOR environment variable must be set): homesick open CASTLE To execute a shell command inside the root directory of a given castle: homesick exec CASTLE COMMAND To execute a shell command inside the root directory of every cloned castle: homesick exec_all COMMAND Not sure what else homesick has up its sleeve? There's always the built in help: homesick help If you ever want to see what version of homesick you have type: homesick version|-v|--version .homesick_subdir homesick link basically makes symlink to only first depth in castle/home. If you want to link nested files/directories, please use .homesick_subdir. For example, when you have castle like this: castle/home `-- .config `-- fooapp |-- config1 |-- config2 `-- config3 and have home like this: $ tree -a ~ |-- .config | `-- barapp | |-- config1 | |-- config2 | `-- config3 `-- .emacs.d |-- elisp `-- inits You may want to symlink only to castle/home/.config/fooapp instead of castle/home/.config because you already have ~/.config/barapp. In this case, you can use .homesick_subdir. Please write "directories you want to look up sub directories (instead of just first depth)" in this file. castle/.homesick_subdir .config and run homesick link CASTLE. The result is: ~ |-- .config | |-- barapp | | |-- config1 | | |-- config2 | | `-- config3 | `-- fooapp -> castle/home/.config/fooapp `-- .emacs.d |-- elisp `-- inits Or homesick track NESTED_FILE CASTLE adds a line automatically. For example: homesick track .emacs.d/elisp castle castle/.homesick_subdir .config .emacs.d home directory ~ |-- .config | |-- barapp | | |-- config1 | | |-- config2 | | `-- config3 | `-- fooapp -> castle/home/.config/fooapp `-- .emacs.d |-- elisp -> castle/home/.emacs.d/elisp `-- inits and castle castle/home |-- .config | `-- fooapp | |-- config1 | |-- config2 | `-- config3 `-- .emacs.d `-- elisp Supported Ruby Versions Homesick is tested on the following Ruby versions: 3.2 3.3 3.4 Note on Patches/Pull Requests Fork the project. Make your feature addition or bug fix. Add tests for it. This is important so it doesn't get broken unintentionally in a future version. Commit, but do not touch the rakefile, version, or history. (If you want your own version, that is fine — just bump the version in a separate commit that can be ignored when merging.) Open a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches. Need homesick without the ruby dependency? Check out homeshick. Copyright Copyright (c) 2010 Joshua Nichols. See LICENSE for details.
Read the full README on GitHub

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