I haven't needed to keep track of dotfiles per se, but for servers I need to track changes to /etc and for that I use Etckeeper[1]

1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Etckeeper

I didn't discover Chezmoi until seeing this thread (sigh). I developed a tool, filetailor, with an almost identical goal (dotfile management while accounting for differences across machines). It uses Python and YAML, but from what I can tell is similar in concept to Chezmoi.

https://github.com/k4j8/filetailor

One thing I like about filetailor I didn't see in Chezmoi was the ability to surround code with a comment specifying which machines it should be commented/uncommented for. It's easier than templates in some situations.

It works great, but there's probably tons of bugs that occur when used by someone other than me. I don't have a CS background and this was my first big hobby project.

You can use chezmoi to manage files outside your home directory if you really want to.

For an example, see https://github.com/felipecrs/dotfiles:

The `home` directory contains home directory files.

The `root` directory contains root directory files (e.g `/etc`).

I've partially adopted `aconfmgr` for the other stuff, but haven't put in the effort to refine my config, partly because I only have one applicable (arch-based) system at the moment.