Actually, they're mostly my workplace dotfiles: as they are shared with my colleagues on the servers, I don't put too much customisation in it (like unbinding arrows in Vim). At least not anything that would change to much the default behavior of a program, I almost got beaten to death for that and it's definitely not cool.

Use make vim to install vim config, make mutt for mutt, etc. The Makefile proceeds like this:

• it takes the original config file, and put it in place of the one in the dotfiles directory ;
• it then replaces it with a symlink in the dotfiles dir.

It also keeps a backup of your original config file in the backup/ directory, just in case, but this way you get to keep all config file like they were before. Then, you get to make diff, which is just calling git difftool, and you're good to merge your local changes with the repo.

It's a pretty cool enhancement over most Makefiles found in dotfiles repos around, as they often don't take care of existing files. Of course for your own computer you don't care, but when taking over a few hundred servers, you may get your head on a pike for erasing somebody's config with a script (I, at least, would get yours).