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Program-specific usage tips

For most programs, using dotstree should be straightforward. That's the point! 😎

Occasionally, you get quirky programs that have a convoluted way of storing configuration. This page has some tips for known cases.

Linux

Kitty

Kitty has the nice feature of allowing includes in its config. The include will not work if you symlink just kitty.conf, as kitty will look for includes relative to the symlink, not the symlink target. Instead you should symlink the entire kitty dir:

symlinks:
  # This breaks includes, don't do it!
  #- from: ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
  #  to: dots/kitty.conf

  # Symlink entire dir so that includes work
  - from: ~/.config/kitty
    to: ./dots

Now include colors.conf in dots/kitty.conf will correctly load dots/colors.conf.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon uses a complex configuration system and it's not practical to simply symlink the underlying files. Instead, you can dump the config into a file and version that.

Your dump.sh script will look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

dconf dump /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ > keybindings.dconf
dconf dump /org/cinnamon/desktop/applications/ > applications.dconf

You can do whatever paths you want, but it's probably not a good idea to just do the entire /org/cinnamon/ it will have many non-portable things and probably won't work.

A load.sh must have the corresponding commands (yes, I know it's cat abuse):

#!/usr/bin/env sh

cat keybindings.dconf | dconf load /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/
cat applications.dconf | dconf load /org/cinnamon/desktop/applications/

You can now create a spec.yaml:

install ./load.sh

And dots install will also load your dconf settings.

In this example, you'd have to manually keep the two scripts synchronized. You can also single-source the list of dconf keys and corresponding files from something like keys.json. Then your dump and load scripts would iterate through keys.json and call dconf load/dump for each one. I find that doing this kind of stuff is easier in Python, so the scripts can become dump.py and load.py -- and your spec would say install: python load.py.