Dotfile settings

[Skenvy]

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Considering trying out codespaces as part of looking in to devcontainers, but the lack of the option to select a specific branch in the repo under https://github.com/settings/codespaces is a hinderance. I can see it was suggested almost 4 years ago here -- which raises the convention of different branches to track different customisations. E.g. my dotfiles repo's default branch is intentionally thin for this reason (essentially just the default ubuntu skel with a few lines difference) so setting the repo without setting the branch is essentially useless for me. Would be keen to see that option added.

On a sidenote, the docs here seem to suggest that in the absence of an install/bootstrap/setup file, that only .* files and folders and linked in to home. I'm not too concerned about most non dot files, but wanted to ask whether the [dotfile-repo]/bin folder is linked as well or not?

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[Skenvy]

What tag on the changelog site is the one to filter by for this topic (codespaces) 😄

[Amirreza-Jabbari]

Codespaces will only pull your repo’s default branch for dotfiles (no branch picker in Settings), so if you rely on a non‑default branch for your customisations it won’t work until GitHub adds that feature.

As for the dotfiles installer: it clones your repo but only symlinks files and folders whose names start with a “.” (plus the special top‑level bin/ directory) into your $HOME—everything in bin/ will be linked and put on your PATH, but other non‑dot files aren’t.