How Tuckr works

Tuckr mandates that all dotfiles are under a dotfiles directory. This directory should be on your systems standard location for configuration files. On Unix-like OSes $HOME/.dotfiles is also permitted, but is discouraged.

Tuckr looks up the following paths for dotfiles:

The dotfiles directory itself has the following structure:

dotfiles
├── Configs # Stores all configuration files
├── Secrets # Stores encrypted files
└── Hooks # Stores scripts that configure the system

Dotfile validation

All dotfiles are stored inside of the Configs directory. Inside this directory you will find a directory for each program or group of dotfiles (I recommend making each group the dotfiles for a specific program, but you can group them however you want). Tuckr will use these groups to same files that are already in your $HOME directory:

• if it points to the dotfile in the repo it's deemed as symlinked
• if it's not symlinked it's deemed as unsymlinked
• if it's a symlink but points somewhere else it's put on the not_owned bucket to indicate that it's in conflict

All these checks are done right after the program's execution starts. Once the entire repo is mapped to either one of those states. The actual command execution starts.

Some commands work only on dotfiles with certain statuses, such as:

• add: works on not_symlinked and not_owned if conflicts are being resolved
• rm: works on symlinked

Hooks

Hooks are scripts used to configure and clean up your dotfiles. You can run hooks before and after adding a dotfile, you can also run a hook when removing a dotfile. These hooks are only called if using the set and unset commands.

The hooks are stored in dotfiles/Hooks and when they should be run is determined by their suffixes:

• pre_: run before adding dotfiles
• post_: run after adding dotfiles
• rm_: run when removing dotfiles

Most scripts will likely not matter if they're run before or after having the dotfiles symlinked, but sometimes this is useful.

Secrets

Secrets use is discouraged right now, they're the least maintained part of the program as I've spent most of the time making sure the other parts of the program are correct and useful.

Secrets might end up being removed later on or improved enough that I might start recommending people to use it.