// the take
This is Tom Payne's personal dotfiles repo, managed with chezmoi (the dotfile manager he also wrote). It's less a tool you install and more a reference implementation for people already using chezmoi who want to see how someone pushes the templating and scripting features to their limit across macOS, Linux, and Windows.
It demonstrates nearly every advanced chezmoi mechanism in one place: run_once/run_onchange scripts gated by OS, .chezmoiexternal for pulling in third-party files without vendoring them, chezmoiremove/chezmoiignore for pruning stale state, and private_/exact_ prefixes for permissions and directory semantics. Secrets are templated at apply-time via the 1Password CLI rather than committed anywhere, which is the right pattern and a clean example of it. The scripts are split cleanly by platform (darwin/linux/windows) instead of one tangled conditional file, so each OS's install logic is actually readable.
It's one person's config, not a product — adopting it means reading through someone else's SSH keys, Keychron keyboard layouts, and personal git identity to figure out what to rip out, and chezmoi's templating doesn't save you from that editing pass. The whole secrets flow is a hard dependency on 1Password and its CLI being installed and signed in; if you don't use 1Password, half the .tmpl files won't render and you're rewriting the templating logic, not just the values. There's no CI validating the scripts against new macOS/Windows releases, so a Homebrew or winget change breaking a run_onchange script would only surface the next time someone actually runs chezmoi apply on a fresh machine. And because it's a single maintainer's living config, breaking changes can land at any time with no deprecation path — it's not written for external consumers.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →