chezmoi

A guide for managing chezmoi dotfiles, which are hidden configuration files such as shell and editor settings, across multiple computers. It covers source-file naming, templates, encrypted secrets, and applying changes to your home directory.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or edit chezmoi source files, render Go templates, handle age-encrypted secrets, and review or apply changes safely.
Why use it?
It explains how chezmoi's source files map to real files, permissions, links, and secrets. This reduces mistakes when editing or synchronising configuration between machines.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fmind/dotfiles/chezmoi
Any agent
npx skills add fmind/dotfiles --skill chezmoi
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fmind/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,008 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00032 $0.02008
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.01004
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00402
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00201

Measured 3d ago against content hash 3246de2680cd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

chezmoi scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.agents/skills/chezmoi/SKILL.md · 86 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chezmoi Dotfiles Standard

Canonical setup for chezmoi, the source-of-truth manager for dotfiles across machines. The source tree (~/.local/share/chezmoi) is the only thing you edit; chezmoi apply renders it into the home directory. File names encode target path, permissions, encryption, and rendering, so the grammar below is the core of the tool. Pins the toolchain via the mise skill and formats configs via the dprint skill.

1. Source-Attribute Naming Grammar

A source name is built from optional prefixes + name + suffixes; chezmoi strips them to compute the target. Combine in this order (type → attributes → dot_ → name → suffix):

[create_|modify_|remove_|symlink_] [encrypted_] [private_] [readonly_] [executable_] [dot_] <name> [.tmpl] [.age]

Prefix / suffix Effect on the target
dot_foo ~/.foo — never write a literal leading dot in a source path.
private_ mode 0600. executable_0755. readonly_ → drop write bits.
encrypted_ + .age decrypted on apply (see §3). Order is encrypted_private_dot_foo.
symlink_<name>.tmpl a symlink whose target path is the rendered file content (verbatim).
modify_<name> script/template that rewrites the existing target (partial ownership, §2).
create_ / remove_ write only if absent / delete the target.
<name>.tmpl Go-template rendered with chezmoi data (§2).
run_[once_|onchange_][before_|after_]<name>.sh a hook script run during apply (§4).

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 86 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 3246de2680cd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

chezmoi is a skill published in the GitHub repository fmind/dotfiles (4 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 2,008 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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