Where does finicky store the path to the config file?

[usizu]

Any ideas, suggestions or other feedback

Question: is there a config file in which finicky remembers the path to the specified .finicky.js file?

Reason: In the finicky menu it's possible to select a config file at an arbitrary path. I'm using a dotfile manager to manage my .finicky.js file at a non-default path (.config/..., to keep my ~/ folder tidy) which means manually telling finicky where the new file is located when installing finicky and the config on a fresh machine.

I want to have the whole thing automated (finicky with Brew bundle and the config with chez-moi). It's almost there except I need to manually tell finicky where the new config is located.
Is there some file in which finicky is storing the path to .finicky.js, so that I could put into my dotfile manager also? Then when I deploy finicky and its settings to a new machine, I won't have to manually point it to the custom config path.

Hope I'm making sense, thanks for any info

[jbleuzen]

It's a constant in the code => /Finicky/Finicky/Config.swift
I think you can't do what you want...

[kyounger]

Interestingly, there is a way to "Use another file..." from the menu bar drop down. If you add a different config file location through that UI, and then run the command:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c print ~/Library/Preferences/net.kassett.finicky.plist

It clearly shows that file being stored in some encoded way. Beyond my MacFu to understand how to get that set programmatically.

[kyounger]

The other issue is that it seems it can't use a symlink as the config file setting, making using nix home-manager difficult.

[kyounger]

If it helps anyone else coming here for the same thing, I ended up just hacking a little around it.

  home.file.".config/finicky" = {
    source = ./finicky;
    onChange = "cat ~/.config/finicky/fincky.js > ~/.finicky.js";
  };

[gshpychka]

If it helps anyone else coming here for the same thing, I ended up just hacking a little around it.

  home.file.".config/finicky" = {
    source = ./finicky;
    onChange = "cat ~/.config/finicky/fincky.js > ~/.finicky.js";
  };

Thanks for this! This might be even better:

{config, ...}: let
  filePath = "finicky/config.js";
in {
  xdg.configFile.${filePath} = {
    source = ./config.js;
    onChange = "cat ${config.xdg.configHome}/${filePath} > ${config.home.homeDirectory}/.finicky.js";
  };
}

[dudeofawesome]

The path to the config file is stored in Finicky's plist file at ~/Library/Preferences/net.kassett.finicky.plist, under the config_location_bookmark path.

The field type is set to data, which seems to contain a "bookmark", which acts as a link to the actual file.

Apple's NSUrl can be used to generate this bookmark data, which can then be output as hex to use in the plist.

I've got a PR open with mkalias to add support for writing the bookmark data directly to stdout.

Once that PR is merged and nixpkgs is updated to use the new version, a simple bash script in nix's onChange (or a home.activation script) could look like this:

onChange = ''
  PATH="/usr/bin:$PATH" $DRY_RUN_CMD defaults write \
    net.kassett.finicky config_location_bookmark \
      -data "$(${pkgs.mkalias}/bin/mkalias "${config.home.homeDirectory}/${config.xdg.configFile.finicky.target}")"
'';

Or use my branch today using an overlay:

nixpkgs.overlays = [
  (final: prev: {
    mkalias = prev.mkalias.overrideAttrs (old: {
      src = prev.fetchFromGitHub {
        owner = "dudeofawesome";
        repo = "mkalias";
        rev = "feat/stdout-hex-data";
        hash = "sha256-pPIMLnbpx8A9nvKsrOFFcsSu2v260dLr+4HQAc8A9xc=";
      };
    });
  })
];