rcm-fast

A fork of thoughtbot/rcm with improved performance, bug fixes, and additional features.

This is a management suite for dotfiles. See the tutorial in rcm(7) to get started quickly.

It assumes that you have a separate dotfiles directory, or are interested in creating one.

The programs provided are rcup(1), mkrc(1), rcdn(1), lsrc(1), and rcgc(1). They are explained in the tutorial and configured using rcrc(5).

Fast?

This fork offers three advantages over upstream RCM:

1. As the name suggests, it is faster. RCM is rather slow because it forks several subprocesses per dotfile to compute their destination. rcm-fast uses shell builtins instead, which, on a 200-entry dotfiles directory, results in about a 3x speedup over upstream. (See maint/benchmark.)
2. It has a feature that RCM lacks: a command for finding and removing broken symbolic links to dotfiles that no longer exist. See rcgc(1).
3. It fixes some relatively minor bugs.

Behavior parity with upstream can be verified via the maint/difftest script, which checks lsrc output against your actual dotfiles.

Because RCM has had no behavioral code change since 2022 (and its open pull requests go unreviewed), this is maintained as its own project rather than as a patch series waiting to be pulled in.

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR):

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rcm-fast

MacOS (Homebrew):

brew install fictionic/tap/rcm-fast

From a release tarball:

curl -LO https://github.com/fictionic/rcm-fast/releases/download/$VERSION/rcm-fast-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar -xf rcm-fast-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd rcm-fast-$VERSION
./configure
make
sudo make install

From source -- needs autoconf, automake and pystache:

git clone https://github.com/fictionic/rcm-fast
cd rcm-fast
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Of course, make sure to remove an installation of upstream RCM first.

Programs

• rcup(1) is the main program. It is used to install and update dotfiles, with support for tags, host-specific files, and multiple source directories.
• rcdn(1) is the opposite of rcup(1).
• mkrc(1) is for introducing a dotfile into your dotfiles directory, with support for tags and multiple source directories.
• lsrc(1) shows you all your dotfiles and where they would be symlinked to. It is used by rcup(1) but is provided for your own use, too.
• rcgc(1) removes symlinks created by rcup(1) that are now broken because their dotfiles were renamed or deleted.

Support

This is a personal fork, maintained for my own use. I am not soliciting contributions and make no promises about response times. See DEVELOPERS.md to build it yourself.

License

Copyright 2013 Mike Burns. BSD license. Copyright 2014 thoughtbot. BSD license. Copyright 2026 Dylan Forbes. BSD license.