I wanted to encapsulate all of my .dotfiles in a repo as an easier way to setup new Linux environments. Previously I would cp my config files to my ~/.dotfiles directory after I made a change. But no more! Now I am using GNU Stow to symlink my dotfiles in their default locations to my ~/.dotfiles directory/repo where I can edit them and push my changes to GitHub without having to manually copy them over every time I make an edit and want to push the change.
Say you have a config folder in your home directory like ~/.config and you have your Neovim config in there like ~/.config/nvim/init.vim. All you need to do is create a directory you want, I used ~/.dotfiles, and mkdir for every config you need.
mkdir -p ~/.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim
mv ~/.config/nvim/init.vim ~/.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/
Now from within ~/.dotfiles run:
stow nvim
and since the structure inside ~/.dotfiles/nvim is ~/.config/nvim stow knows to go up one directory from where you are (ie go to your home dir) and match the path .config/nvim and symlink every file that's in your .dotfiles/nvim.
This means ~/.config/nvim/init.vim uses ~/.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/init.vim as its source of truth and anything you do to the dotfile version will directly affect the actual config file version.
Now if you go to ~/.config/nvim you will see a file/directory representing everything that's in your .dotfiles/nvim. Now you can manage the dotfiles repo without having to move them around to update them. You manage it all from your .dotfiles directory.