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.
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.
Five directories swept in held no files — matplotlib, three gtk dirs and
one mpv. Git cannot represent an empty directory, so they existed on
mainframe where they were created but vanished on clone, and system76's
install failed with "Nonexistent target".
install now checks every link source exists before running dotbot, so this
surfaces on the machine that introduced it rather than the next one to
pull.
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).
Git reads both, and ~/.gitconfig wins. Linking only the XDG path left the
stale ~/.gitconfig in charge, so system76 kept signing commits as a
previous employer even after the cutover appeared to succeed — the symlink
was correct and had no effect.
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