μdot

A micro sized dotfile manager

μdot (also written mudot when I can't or don't fell like inserting the 'μ') is a tiny dotfile manager I wrote mostly for myself to replace this method which while I used somewhat happily for years has really started to bug me lately. Yes it written in python3, so you may rightfully dispute how 'micro' it is but I refuse to write any more than 10 lines of bash, and the micro really refers to the conceptual and functional simplicity, which I will describe now.

Function

Coneptually, all μdot does is build up a dictionary mapping paths in one directory to other paths and then executes some code using that mapping. The mapping is defined within the files and directories themeselves using directive strings at the beginging of files and hidden files in a directory.

Mapping

μdot recursivly follows the following rules. For each path its location is determined by the following rules, whichever applies first: 4. If the path matches a path defined in a .mudot-ignore file (described below) in any of its parent directories then the file is ignored. 2. If the path points to a file and the first line of the file contains the string ~--X (surrounded by anything) then that file is ignored; in other words not mapped anywhere.

1. If the path points to a file and the first line of the file contains a string looking like ~--> '$DESTINATION_PATH' (surrounded by anything) then that file is mapped to $DESTINATION_PATH.
2. If the path points to a directory and the directory contains a .dest-dir file, the entire directory is mapped to the path on the first line of the .dest-dir file, and the directory is not recursed into
3. If the path points to a directoy which does not contain a .dest-dir file then these rules are applied recursivly to the directory's children.

.mudot-ignore

This file is like a basic .gitignore. Each line defines a path to ignore. Each line can contain an absolute path or a relative path which is resolved relative to the parent directory of the .mudot-ignore

Execution

Once the map is built, anything could be done with it (and more features may be added in the future), but the primary use is to then create soft links from the source to the destinations. μdot has (or will have) different options for dealing with conflicts, ie when a link destination already exists and it is not equivalent to the link you are about to create, the only method is failing on a conflict and expecting the user to resolve the conflict before running μdot again.

Usage

Run mudot $DIR to print out the generated mapping as tree. Run mudot $DIR --link to link the sources to the destinations.

TODO

• Support linking when the destination directory already exists. For example, something has already added files to .config/whataver but you want to copy your stuff over without overwriting the preexisting stuff. This should be a speacial command or arg to link like link-respecting-preexisting. It could work sort of like moving the preexsting config to a temporary place, linking your config then attempting to recursivly copy from the original config into your softlinked config failing (and undoing all of the copying it already did) if something in original tries to overwrite something in yours because this would indicate a conflict. Could leave the original in /tmp for you to resolve the conflict
• better error handling
• Smarter linker (more options for handling conflicts like overwrite all, get user input on case by case, 'grafting' as describd above, etc)
• Tests
• Smarter mapping printer (showing info like git status, link status, destination status, etc.)
• be able to list untracked siblings of mapped files
• package with poetry or something