Toml Bombadil is a dotfile manager written in rust.
I wrote Toml Bombadil because I kept changing my desktop environment : switching from i3 to sway, from sway to xfce, from xfce to gnome and back to sway. When you keep changing your working environment like this you end up with several problems : - Some symlinks will end up orphans. - Not every program you use support Xresources and you will most probably have to manually edit some themes/config. - When starting a fresh installation you will very likely need to adapt your existing dotfiles to your new machine. - It is a mess
Toml Bombadil try to solve this with a simple addition to the symlink method used by other tools : instead of creating a symlink from a dotfile to the actual config path of a program, it will create a copy of it and symlink the copy. This additional step allow to use your original dotfile as a template and inject variables in the copy. You can have multiple value files in the same dotfile repository and change color scheme, or any value on the fly.
In addition this is completely optional, you could start using Toml Bombadil only to generate symlinks and templatize your dot file progressively.
shell script
cargo install toml-bombadil
shell script
yay -S bombadil-bin
1. Setup :
By default Bombadil will look for a toml config file named bombadil.toml.
shell script
git clone https://github.com/my_org/my_dotfiles
cd my_dotfiles && touch bombadil.toml
If you are using git you might want to add .dots to your .gitignore.
2. Configuration :
```toml
dotfilesdir = "mydotfiles"
source is relative to dotfiles_dir[[dot]] source = "sway" target = ".config/sway"
[[dot]] source = "alacritty" target = ".config/alacritty/alacritty.yml"
[[var]] # Optional path = "vars.toml"
[[meta]] # Optional path = "meta-vars.toml"
[[hook]] # Optional command = "sway reload" ```
3. Linking bombadil :
For Bombadil to be able to run from any directory and use different config files we need to symlink bombadil config to
$XDG_CONFIG_DIR/bombadil.toml :
shell script
bombadil install -c my_dotfiles/bombadil.toml
If you want to switch to another config simply run :
shell script
bombadil install -c my_dotfiles/bombadil-i3.toml
4. Install template and symlink :
shell script
bombadil link
This command will do the following :
- Remove {dotfiles_dir}/.dots and any symlink pointing to a sub directory/file.
- Inject variables (if you defined some) in a copy of dot entries listed in Bombadil config.
- Write the copies to {dotfiles_dir}/.dots.
- Symlink dot entries.
- Run post install hooks.
Now that your dot files are symlinked with Bombadil you can define some variables A Bombadil var files is a valid toml file containing only key with string values :
For example you have the following file in {dotfiles_dir}/vars.toml.
toml
terminal = "alacritty"
background = "#292C3E"
foreground = "#EBEBEB"
text = "#FF261E"
cursor = "#FF261E"
black = "#0d0d0d"
red = "#FF301B"
green = "#A0E521"
yellow = "#FFC620"
blue = "#1BA6FA"
You can use the var file by adding the following to your Bombadil config :
toml
[[var]]
path = "vars.toml"
Let's say you have the following dot entry :
toml
[[dot]]
source = "alacritty"
target = ".config/alacritty/alacritty.yml"
alacritty.yaml color scheme could look like this :
```yaml
...
colors: primary: background: "[background]" foreground: "[foreground]" cursor: text: "[text]" cursor: "[cursor]" ... ```
And the output file actually linked to alacritty config would be this :
```yaml ...
colors: primary: background: "#292C3E" foreground: "#EBEBEB" cursor: text: "#FF261E" cursor: "#FF261E" ... ```
To update variables and the current config simply run bombadil link.
Sometimes it could be handy to use different variables names for the same values. For instance if you want to define a system wide color scheme, you could define the following meta variables :
```toml
[[meta]] path = "meta_vars.toml"
[[var]] path = "alacritty_vars.toml"
[[var]] path = "sway_vars.toml"
```
A meta variable configuration looks exactly like a variables configuration file. The only difference is that meta vars are intended to be used in other var files :
```toml
metared = "#ff0000" metablack = "#000000" meta_green = "#008000" ```
```toml
swayclientfocusedbackground = "metablack" swayclientfocused_border = "#ffff00"
```
```toml
alacrittybackground = "metablack" alacrittycursor = "metagreen"
```
As we saw Bombadil allows to define global variables for all your dotfiles. For some programs you might want to set alternate configurations for a single config file and change it without reloading the whole bombadil config. Bombadil allow you two do this in two different way : by changing the source file linked against user configuration or by overriding variables only for this specific file.
Let's say you are using maven for several java projects, some of them are open source and some of them uses a corporate repository :
let's assume your dotfiles are the following :
shell script
~/bombadil-example
❯ tree
.
├── bombadil.toml
└── maven
├── settings.corporate.xml
└── settings.xml
Your bombadil config contains a single dot entry with an alternate profile :
```toml
dotile_dir = "bombadil-example"
[[dot]] name = "maven" # dot entry with profiles require to be named in order to generate bombadil command source = "settings.xml" target = ".m2/settings.xml" [[dot.profile]] # A profile entry for the maven dotfile (you can define as many as you want) name = "corporate" # name of the profile, required to generate bombadil command switch.source = "settings.corporate.xml" # we are going to use alternate dot source to "settings.corporate.xml" hook = "echo changed mvn env" # post install hook ```
If you now run bombadil --help you should notice a new subcommand named after your dot entry name as been generated :
```
USAGE:
bombadil
...
SUBCOMMANDS: help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install Link a given bombadil config to XDGCONFIGDIR/bombadil.toml link Symlink a copy of your dotfiles and inject variables according to bombadil.toml config maven User defined profile command ```
Let's now run bombadil maven --help :
``` User defined profile command
USAGE:
bombadil maven --set-profile
OPTIONS:
-s, --set-profile
As you can see the possible values for the --set-profile flag contains the profile we defined and a default profile which correspond to the default source.
We can now switch profile like so :
shell script
bombadil maven --set-env corporate
Or using the short flag version:
shell script
bombadil maven -s corporate
This will update the file linked to $HOME/.m2/settings.xml to use settings.corporate.xml. If you defined template
variables in that file they will be replaced as if you ran the link command.
To revert to the default profile you can run bomadil maven -s default. Using bomadil link will also reset all defined
profiles to their default values.
Switching variables is done the same way as switching source :
Here is an example bombadil config :
shell script
~/bombadil-example
❯ tree
.
├── bashrc
├── bombadil.toml
├── java10-vars.toml
└── vars.toml
```shell script
export JAVAHOME=[javahome]
```
```toml
java_home = "/etc/java-openjdk" ```
```toml
java_home = "/etc/java10-openjdk" ```
Switching profile by var would be done like this :
```toml
dotfiles_dir = "bombadil-example"
[[dot]]
name = "bash"
source = "bashrc"
target = ".bashrc"
[[dot.profile]]
name = "java10"
switch.vars = "java10-vars.toml" # This is the only difference with the switch source method
```
We could now override the variable with our java10 profile by running the following :
shell script
bombadil bash -s java10
And switch back to default :
shell script
bombadil bash -s default
So far we have no talked about hooks, as we saw they can be invoked as an entry in the config :
toml
[[hook]]
command = "sway reload"
This will invoke the sway reload command after bombadil link has updated your dotfiles.
You can also define post install hook for custom profile :
```toml dotfiles_dir = "bombadil-example"
[[dot]] name = "alacritty" source = "allacritty" target = ".config/alacritty" [[dot.profile]] name = "nord" switch.vars = "nord-colors.toml" hook = "neofetch" ```
This will run neofetch after updating your alacritty color scheme with the nord color palette.
toml
[[hook]]
command = "source /home/user/.zshrc" # This does not work !
toml
[[hook]]
command = "echo $HOME" # This will print "$HOME" unexpanded
toml
[[hook]]
command = "zsh -c \"echo $HOME\"" # This works
If you use Bombadil please submit an issue or a PR to update this section, we will be happy to reference your dotfiles here !
Found a bug, have a suggestion for a new feature ? Please submit an issue.
All the code in this repository is released under the MIT License, for more information take a look at the LICENSE file.