Hi,
Like many others, I use stow to manage my dotfiles across multiple machines. In particular, a small exerpt of my stow tree includes
~/dotfiles/vim/plugin
~/dotfiles/vim/syntax
...
so I can just cd ~/dotfiles && stow -S vim after git-cloning dotfiles to a new machine.
But that'll just do a symlink ~/.vim -> ~/dotfiles/.vim, which is not what I want: this will cause e.g. ~/.vim/undo to end up in ~/dotfiles as well. So I *always* want to split open ~/.vim. In this specific case I could alternatively get away with gitignoring all other directories in ~/.vim, but this is less optimal for dotfiles which reside e.g. in ~/.config, as I really don't want ~/.config to be a symlink but rather ~/.config/foo to be one.
So I need to first create ~/.vim myself and manually add a directory into it (e.g. ~/.vim/undo) before stowing my dotfiles, to force splitting that directory. It would be nice it it was possible to create e.g. ~/dotfiles/vim/.stow-force-split (name is up to bikeshedding) to say, "you are not allowed to symlink this directory directly, but must split it".
Looking forward to your thoughts,
Antony