Confidant

Your configuration pal and confidant.

A configuration (or dotfile) management tool, designed to be easy to use, fast, focused and reliable.

$ confidant link
>>> linked ~/.bashrc
>>> linked ~/.config/nvim
>>> linked ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

The Problem

Your configuration files are expected to be somewhere, and keeping track of them with a version control system is not simple.

The Solution

A repository containing your real files, and a program that manages creating symbolic links where your files need to be, with as little effort needed as possible.

Why Confidant?

It combines the power of simple templating inspired by Ansible with the practical symlink-based approach of GNU Stow to create a robust tool that I (the author, biased) think is the Goldilocks of configuration management.

In addition to its' functionality, I have put extensive time and effort into making the user experience as pleasant and considerate as possible. Confidant follows the XDG basedir specification and no-color community standard out of the box. I've also provided and maintain up-to-date command-line shell completions files for Fish, Bash and Zsh.

Background

I was unsatisfied with the choices on offer for this task, and there are a few options one might choose. For a very long time, I was using GNU Stow; which is a brilliant piece of software, but it was designed as a symlink farm manager in a generic sense, and lacks some usability features for the task of managing configuration files. I then tried both Chezmoi and Yadm but found them both to be heavy-handed and seemed like far more than what I needed.

I was left wanting. For a short time I used Ansible, and I quite liked the templating features. However, Ansible covers a wide scope, it does IT automation, software deployment and complex orchestration. These are all great features, but usage of Ansible felt very slow, which makes sense since it is a very complex and versatile tool.

At that point, a lightbulb appeared above my head, using my abilities writing C++ to make a very fast, simple and easy to use configuration manager. One that provides the power of simple templating and a friendly interface. Well, here we are.