The file covered the inference stack in detail and said almost nothing about
the repo it now lives in, so every session rediscovered the same handful of
conventions.
Adds the four hosts with their addresses, roles and package managers --
including that sctfw004 is US-government adjacent and stays on OpenAI and
local models only -- and the five things here that actually cost an hour: the
allowlist .gitignore, and why a new directory being invisible to git is
expected rather than broken; secrets living only in an untracked
~/.secrets.zsh and never in a tracked zshenv; ConditionHost as the guard that
keeps a one-machine timer from firing on all four; and dots / pkg-snapshot as
the maintenance pair, with the deliberate silence of dots --nag explained.
Also notes that ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is a symlink into this repo, since
editing it silently edits tracked config, and sharpens the .pre-<thing> note:
that convention is for the untracked ~/config and ~/docs trees, where it is
the only backup those files get. Inside a tracked repo git already is the
backup and .gitignore excludes the pattern anyway.
Audited every non-shell context in the repo — hypr, waybar, systemd,
desktop entries — for repo scripts named without a path. Two real hits
beyond the scratchpad bind:
hyprctl_modify_wkspc1 runs from exec-once at every Hyprland startup, so it
has been failing silently on both laptops since ~/.local/bin stopped being
a symlink into the repo. Nothing surfaces an exec-once that cannot find its
binary.
system76's playlistBuilder bind had the same bare hypr_workspace. Its inner
command already used `zsh -lc`, so `play` resolved; the outer call did not.
Scratchpad terminal. The original config called hypr_workspace by absolute
path; splitting the config into common and host layers I rewrote those to
bare names, assuming PATH would resolve them. It does not: Hyprland's exec
runs with whatever PATH the session inherited at startup, which here is the
system default — no ~/.local/bin, no repo directories. That was survivable
while ~/.local/bin was a symlink into the repo, but the cutover made it a
real directory and removed the 29 duplicated scripts, so the binding broke.
Repo scripts are now named via $bin, defined per host in local-env.conf
because the home directory differs.
Same commit fixes toggleFloating.sh, which the shared config referenced as
/home/connor/.config/... — correct on two machines, wrong on the work
laptop. Now ~.
rbw. The old install.conf.yaml linked ~/.config/rbw on every host; I put it
in the mainframe and system76 host configs and forgot the work laptop, so
rbw there had no config at all. Moved to base, where it was always meant to
be.
Moonlight went on the work laptop as a flatpak, which neither apt-mark nor
pacman can see — so a rebuild from the manifests would have silently left
it out. pkg-restore adds the flathub user remote before installing, since
Ubuntu ships flathub as a system remote that --user cannot resolve.
System-scope flatpaks are deliberately not recorded: those belong to
whoever administers the machine, not to these dotfiles.
Connor's call: the work laptop's commented-out copilot is the state he
wants on all four machines, so the host conditional added in 8ddbbe2 is
unnecessary machinery. Back to a plain plugin list.
zshenv is read by every zsh, so a nested shell prepended the repo's bin
directories a second time. The NAS showed each of them twice after one
`zsh -l -i`. typeset -U keeps the first occurrence, which is also the
ordering this file intends.
The NAS is a minimal Arch install with no inetutils, so hostname(1) does
not exist and install died on its first line of real work. uname -n is
POSIX and always present. The same assumption was in dots, pkg-snapshot,
pkg-restore and zshenv's fallback.
Taking the work laptop's init.lua as canonical carried its commented-out
copilot line to every machine. Copilot was enabled on mainframe, system76
and the NAS before the refit — only the work laptop had it off. Sharing the
file silently disabled it on the other three.
The plugin list is now built in a table and copilot appended unless the
host is sctfw004. Keyed on vim.fn.hostname() rather than $DOTFILES_HOST,
because nvim launched from a desktop entry does not inherit the shell's
environment.
Promoting the work laptop's copy to common/ carried its hardcoded fdfind,
which is the Debian/Ubuntu binary name. On Arch the binary is fd, so the
script would have failed on system76 — quietly, since it runs from a timer.
The work laptop's first install left five files dirty, all of them wallust
targets. Tracking generated colour files means each machine rewrites the
others' palette on every theme change — exactly the churn a shared repo
should not have.
hypr, waybar and swaync now get their colours as real files written into
real directories, so nothing is linked and nothing is tracked. kitty and
qutebrowser land inside directories this repo links wholesale, so those two
are ignored by path instead. swaync switched from a directory link to two
file links to make room for its generated colors.css.
Regeneration is automatic: hypr_refresh runs every 15 seconds on both
laptops, so a fresh machine has colours within a quarter of a minute.
Both laptops run hypr_refresh and their unit files had diverged. The work
laptop's is the refined one — Type=oneshot, which is correct for a script
that exits, a 15s interval with AccuracySec, and a comment explaining the
wallpaper-daemon guard. system76 had Type=simple with Restart=on-failure,
which respawns a oneshot script continuously. Shared version wins.
Three more units existed only on the work laptop and were untracked:
backlight-probe, kanshi and mopidy.
Two passes, both aimed at a consistent experience rather than a faithful
snapshot of each machine's accidents.
Standardisation. Audited every host-layer config present on more than one
machine and asked whether the difference was intent or drift:
- mpv was byte-identical; swayimg differed only because system76 still
had the shipped default and the work laptop had the real config; bob
differed by one setting the work laptop was simply missing.
- user-dirs.dirs disagreed with BOTH machines and with zshenv, which has
said $HOME/downloads all along. Standardised on that.
- mimeapps.list is now the union of both machines' associations.
- swaync's config and style are shared; only wallust's generated
colors.css stays per host, alongside hypr's and waybar's.
All of the above moved to common/.
Dropped as pure state rather than config: gtk-2.0 (file-chooser geometry),
pavucontrol.ini (window size), zoom.conf (a per-install random_key) and
zoomus.conf (panel widths). gtk-3.0 stays per host — its bookmarks encode
the two different home directories.
App config. GIMP, inkscape, FreeCAD, cura, OrcaSlicer, LightBurn and OBS
all hold real settings, so a curated subset of each is now tracked:
settings, keybindings and user content, but not session state, tool
options, device lists or window geometry. kicad is skipped — both library
tables hold a single entry, i.e. untouched defaults.
Content lives once in common/ even when only one machine has the app; the
host configs decide who gets the link. That is the distinction that lets
53% of link sources be shared while the NAS still does not get GIMP.
Two exclusions on credential grounds: obs-studio/plugin_config holds a
websocket server_password, and gh is dropped entirely because `gh auth
login` writes a token into hosts.yml — now also blocked by name.
Reactive capture missed wallust entirely, so this is a systematic pass over
~/.config on all four machines: every entry that is not already a symlink,
judged on whether it is hand-authored config or app-generated state.
Shared and identical everywhere -> common/: lazygit, ncmpcpp, neofetch,
matplotlib. Everything else differs per machine and goes in
hosts/<host>/config/: gtk-2.0/3.0/4.0, mimeapps.list, user-dirs.dirs,
mpv, swaync, swayimg, bob, pavucontrol.ini, zoom; plus beets, bottom,
glow and mpd on system76; fastfetch, gh, uv, traggo, tiling-assistant and
xdg-desktop-portal on the work laptop; inbox-tidy and llmfit on mainframe.
Deliberately excluded, all verified to hold live credentials: the work
laptop's Claude OAuth tokens (~/.config/anthropic/credentials), the NAS
restic repo password and hetzner.env, subsonic passwords in subtui, stmp
and termsonic, mopidy, supersonic, the Proton bridge env and the LiteLLM
virtual keys. The ignore list now names those shapes directly — a bare
`password` file would not have been caught before.
Also excluded as generated state or too large to be meaningful: GIMP,
kicad, BambuStudio, OrcaSlicer, calibre, LightBurn, obs-studio, feishin,
libreoffice, VirtualBox, FortiClient; and mainframe's dead X11-era
leftovers (i3, openbox, lxpanel, lxsession, pcmanfm).
The router resolves it to 10.0.0.2 at the DNS level and the remote URL
already carries :2222, so the alias was redundant everywhere and wrong on
mainframe, where it pointed at localhost. Verified: connecting with
-F /dev/null succeeds from both mainframe and system76.
pkg-snapshot and dots used plain sort, which is locale-dependent: the same
package set ordered differently on two machines, so dots reported drift
that did not exist. A maintenance tool that always cries wolf is the exact
failure mode dots exists to avoid.
The laptops are on different Hyprland versions — system76 on 0.55.4,
the work laptop on 0.54.3 — and the option was removed in 0.55. Taking the
work laptop's config as canonical therefore introduced a config error on
system76 that did not exist before.
It is redundant either way: 0.54.3 reports the default as already enabled.
This is the first case of the shared config needing to tolerate two
compositor versions; it will not be the last.
Putting the whole ssh config in common/ was wrong twice over. It mapped
git.rcjohnstone.com to localhost:2222, which is only true on mainframe
where Gitea runs -- on system76 it broke git entirely. And it replaced a
77-line file holding 13 personal host aliases (storagebox, several
forwarded localhost ports, older work hosts) with a five-entry fleet list.
common/ssh/config now Includes ~/.ssh/config.local first, so host entries
win on the first-value-obtained rule, and carries only the fleet aliases.
Each host keeps its own list; system76's is restored verbatim.
The laptops are themed by wallust, whose config and five templates lived
only in ~/.config/wallust on each machine. A fresh install would have had
no colours at all: hyprland.conf sources colors.conf on its first line and
waybar's style.css imports colors.css on its first line, and nothing in
the repo generated either. Both generated files are now linked per host so
bootstrap works, and wallust writes back through the symlinks.
update_colors.sh was its predecessor and is now actively harmful: it
writes sway/config and wofi/style.css, neither of which exists on any
machine any more, and it regenerates waybar/style.css from a template that
was never carried across -- so running it would have overwritten the
shared Hyprland waybar style with sway-era output.
common/colors (255 theme files, 1.1 MB) was only ever its input.
Replaces the previous repo, which had split into two histories that never
met (mainframe on a dead GitLab remote, the laptops on Gitea) with 146
dirty files across three machines and the NAS never enrolled at all.
Branch-per-machine is gone. One main, with host differences expressed as
small files under hosts/<hostname>/ rather than as branches, so there is
nothing to merge. The reconciled zsh layer reduces 15-33 line forks to
1-7 effective lines per host; distro differences (oh-my-zsh prefix,
syntax-highlighting path, fd vs fdfind) are probed in common/ instead.
Fresh history: the old one carried six plaintext credentials, 45 MB of
mail caches, browser caches and vendored binaries. 5,096 tracked files
and 144 MB become 462 files and 2.6 MB. The .gitignore is now an
allowlist, which is what keeps that true.
Root cause of the rot: ~/.local/bin was a symlink to scripts/ with GOPATH
inside it, so every go install wrote into version control (2.2 GB on the
work laptop). PATH now points at the repo instead of the reverse.
Also: Hyprland replaces sway and is sourced in two halves so $browser is
defined before use; singleton automations carry ConditionHost= alongside
host-layer-only placement; ddns moves from cron to a guarded timer;
package manifests and pkg-snapshot/pkg-restore replace the X11-era
install_scripts/; networkmanager-dmenu added to system76 (the binding
always existed, the package never did).
Connor Johnstone
connor