What is chezmoi-expert?

A skill for managing chezmoi dotfiles, which are configuration files such as shell settings kept under version control. It covers templates, naming rules, cross-platform setup, and troubleshooting.

Finding chezmoi source files, previewing changes, testing applications, and managing configurations across macOS and Linux.

It helps keep configuration changes reproducible and prevents editing the deployed files instead of their managed source files.

How laurigates/dotfiles configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to laurigates/dotfiles. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurigates/dotfiles/main/.claude/skills/chezmoi-expert/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/laurigates/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laurigates/dotfiles/chezmoi-expert.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/laurigates/dotfiles/chezmoi-expert)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/laurigates/dotfiles/chezmoi-expert"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laurigates/dotfiles/chezmoi-expert.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,475 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00088	$0.01475
Opus 5	$0.00044	$0.00737
Sonnet 5	$0.00018	$0.00295
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00147

Measured 5d ago against content hash 8b66c41becb4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

chezmoi-expert 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 5d 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.

.claude/skills/chezmoi-expert/SKILL.md · 153 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 153 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chezmoi Expert

Expert knowledge for managing dotfiles with chezmoi, including templates, cross-platform support, and best practices.

Core Expertise

Source vs Target Management: Always work in ~/.local/share/chezmoi/, never edit target files directly
File Naming Conventions: dot_, private_, readonly_, executable_, exact_, symlink_ prefixes
Template System: Go templates with .chezmoi.* variables for platform-specific configs
Cross-Platform Support: Conditional logic for macOS/Linux differences

Apply workflow

chezmoi apply renders source over target, so it overwrites target-side edits and, inside an exact_ directory, deletes unmanaged entries. Preview before applying:

chezmoi status <tree> — which files are out of sync (M) or would be deleted (D); a path-scoped diff does not show the D lines
chezmoi diff <tree> — what would be overwritten
chezmoi apply -v <path> — apply the reviewed path, then let the user review before a full chezmoi apply

Hazards, --force semantics, and recovery: .claude/rules/chezmoi-apply-hazards.md.

Finding the Source File — Don't Translate Prefixes by Hand

When you know a target path and need the source, ask chezmoi instead of mentally translating dot_/private_/exact_/.tmpl/encrypted_. Stacked prefixes make manual guessing error-prone, and a wrong guess points at a nonexistent path.

chezmoi source-path ~/.zshrc                 # → .../dot_zshrc.tmpl
chezmoi source-path ~/.config/mise/config.toml  # → .../private_dot_config/mise/config.toml.tmpl
chezmoi target-path <source-file>            # inverse: source → target

Canonical edit loop: chezmoi source-path <target> → Read it → Edit it → chezmoi apply. source-path exits non-zero when the target is not managed — check the exit code; if it errors, use chezmoi unmanaged <path> or chezmoi managed <path> to confirm whether the file is unmanaged vs. ignored (chezmoi ignored).

Read the full file on GitHub · 153 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

REFERENCE.md 9.4 KB

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.

5d ago Changed · +4 lines 8b66c41becb4
8d ago First seen · 149 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A b6b4ecb1c8aa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

chezmoi-expert is a skill published in the GitHub repository laurigates/dotfiles (10 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 1,475 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

chezmoi dotfiles managed-by-opentofu

dotfiles-bootstrap

Bootstrap a workstation with the dotfiles framework. Takes a GitHub user / owner+repo / explicit clone URL and runs dot init (which shells out to chezmoi) with the right safety prompts. Honors the active agent profile (ask / plan / apply / audit) so it defaults to dry-run in safer modes and full apply in apply.

sebastienrousseau/dotfiles · 88 tokens

vibe

Delegate a coding task to a cheap AI model (Mistral Vibe by default, but any provider Vibe knows about — DeepSeek, Gemini Flash, etc.) and supervise the result via git diff. Claude orchestrates, the cheap model codes. Claude consumes 500-1500 tokens per delegation regardless of how many file reads the delegate does…

sebastienrousseau/dotfiles · 137 tokens

dotfiles: Skill for Claude Code