xdg-ninja

Because you wouldn't let just anyone into your $HOME

A shell script that checks your $HOME for unwanted files and directories.

When xdg-ninja encounters a file or directory it knows about, it will tell you whether it's possible to move it to the appropriate location, and how to do it.

The configurations are from the arch wiki page on XDG_BASE_DIR, antidot (thanks to Scr0nch for writing a conversion tool), and crowdsourced by other users.

Installing

Manual Installation

Clone the repository, then run the ./xdg-ninja.sh script.

git clone https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja
cd xdg-ninja
./xdg-ninja.sh

This will run every test in the default configuration.

Nix

Turn on flakes, then run the following command:

nix run github:b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

Homebrew

Note

Due to how xdg-ninja is developed, releases are not cut, so Homebrew ships a stale version, therefore you have to install and upgrade xdg-ninja from the git HEAD. ref: #204

Homebrew will not upgrade xdg-ninja when running a generic brew upgrade, you must specifically upgrade xdg-ninja from the git HEAD, see below

Install:

brew install xdg-ninja --HEAD

Upgrade:

brew upgrade xdg-ninja --fetch-HEAD

Other Package Managers

xdg-ninja is available in many other package managers.

The full list is available on the repology page.

Follow the instructions for your package manager to install xdg-ninja.

Contributing

Dependencies

• Your favorite POSIX-compliant shell (bash, zsh, dash, etc.)
• jq for parsing the json files
• find

Optional

• glow for rendering Markdown in the terminal (bat, pygmentize or highlight can be used as a fallback, but glow's output is clearer therefore glow is recommended)

Configuration

The configuration is done in the ./programs/ directory, which should be located in the same working directory as the xdg-ninja.sh script. This can be overridden with the XN_PROGRAMS_DIR environment variable.

You define a program, and then a list of files and directories which that program ruthlessly puts into your $HOME directory.

For each file/directory, you specify if it can be (re)moved.

If this is the case, you also specify instructions on how to accomplish this in Markdown.

Files in this directory can have any name, but using the name of the program is recommended.

Automatically Generating Configuration

For x86_64 Linux systems, you can download the xdgnj binary from the releases page.

Alternatively, you can build it from source using cabal or stack, use the nix flake or use the provided docker image.

To be clear, this is just a tool that will help you automatically generate the config files, you still only need your shell to run the tests

Available commands

xdgnj add # Adds a new configuration
xdgnj prev programs/FILE.json # Preview the configuration for a program
xdgnj edit programs/FILE.json # Edit the configuration for a program
xdgnj run # Mostly the same as running the shell script

Prebuilt Binaries

Important

The binaries only run on x86_64 Linux systems.

curl -fsSL -o xdgnj https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja/releases/latest/download/xdgnj
chmod +x xdgnj

Building from source

You can use cabal build or stack build

Nix

nix run github:b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja#xdgnj-bin ...

Docker

Use the provided dockerfile in ./haskell/build/.

Manually Creating Configuration

We're going to use git as an example.

By default, it puts the file .gitconfig into $HOME.

Luckily, the XDG spec is supported by git, so we can simply move the file to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config.

We can use that last sentence as our instructions. In this case, there are no newlines, so escaping this string for use in json is trivial, however, this is how you should generally approach it:

echo "Luckily, the XDG spec is supported by git, so we can simply move the file to _$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config_." | jq -aRs .

Let's see what the output of this command looks like for something a little more sophisticated.

Here's an example file:

cat example.md

Currently not fixable.

_(But you can probably just delete the dir)_

Here's what catting this file into jq produces:

cat example.md | jq -aRs .

"Currently not fixable.\n\n_(But you can probably just delete the dir)_\n"

Now, we can assemble our final json file:

{
    "name": "git",
    "files": [
        {
            "path": "$HOME/.gitconfig",
            "movable": true,
            "help": "Luckily, the XDG spec is supported by git, so we can simply move the file to _$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config_.\n"
        }
    ]
}

Saving this as git.json in the ./programs/ directory will result in the script picking it up and checking the file.

If you've created a configuration for a file that isn't in the official repository yet, make sure to create a pull request so that other people can benefit from it as well.