antidot 🏠 🔸 💥

Cleans up your $HOME from those pesky dotfiles.

🚧 This is a work in progress! 🚧

Intro

For years I stood by and saw how countless applications populate my home dir with dotfiles.

No more! antidot is a tool to automatically detect and remove dotfiles from $HOME without any risks. It will move files to more appropriate locations (based on XDG base directory specifications). It will also set environment variables, declare aliases and use symlinks to ensure apps can find their files.

Installation

Go to the releases section and grab the one that fits your OS. Brew and AUR packages are planned in the future.

After installing run antidot update to download the latest rules file and you're all set!

How does it Work?

Dotfiles pollution is a complex problem to solve. There are many approaches to solve this annoying issue and antidot is taking the safest one.

We maintain a rule for each dotfile which applies actions when the file is detected. The main goal is to move the files to the most appropriate location while keeping the application working as expected.

There are a few types of actions:

Migrate - Move a file to a new location, optionally symlink the old location to the new one (this is for the hardest cases).
Delete - Delete a file or a directory (only if it's empty).
Export - Export an environment variable.
Alias - Set an alias to a command.

Examples

This is the rule for the Docker configuration directory:

  - name: docker
    dotfile:
      name: .docker
      is_dir: true
    actions:
      - type: migrate
        source: ${HOME}/.docker
        dest: ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/docker
      - type: export
        key: DOCKER_CONFIG
        value: ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/docker

When running antidot clean we will be prompted about this directory:

❯ ./antidot clean
Rule docker:
  MOVE   /Users/doroncohen/.docker → /Users/doroncohen/.config/docker
  EXPORT DOCKER_CONFIG="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/docker"
? Apply rule docker? (y/N)

Answering yes will move the directory and write the environment variable to a file that can be easily sourced by the shell. Running antidot init will create a shell script that will do just that.