Readme

README.md

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+Xion
+====
+
+WORK IN PROGRESS
+
+Xion is a JSON interface to Xfconf, using a slightly modified xfconf-query
+bin. Backup and restore Xfce settings in VCS-friendly files.
+
+This can be useful to synchronise custom keybinds across several Xfce
+installations.
+
+
+
+Usage
+-----
+
+```bash
+# Export custom commands to JSON.
+$ xion -e xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts /commands/custom commands.json
+# Import them on another machine.
+$ xion -i commands.json
+# Want to clear existing commands to keep only those in commands.json?
+$ xion -i commands.json -r
+```
+
+More info with `xion --help`.
+
+
+
+Features
+--------
+
+- Export channel settings, filtering on user-provided root, to JSON files.
+- Import channel settings from those JSON files.
+- Replace entire channel setting trees, or just update with provided values.
+- JSON files with predictable formatting for easy versioning.
+
+
+
+Context
+-------
+
+Xion comes from the need to share parts of the Xfce settings between several
+computers.
+
+> Why don't you just version the Xfconf XML files?
+
+I got frustrated with the way Xfconf stored settings on disk: its XML files have
+unpredictable tag sorting and some volatile values, and Xfconf does not read
+those settings unless you log back-in, and this is if you don't overwrite them
+in the process. This makes diffing modifications cumbersome, especially when
+trying to share parts of my settings in a Git repository. I needed a way to dump
+and restore only some parts of my settings.
+
+Xfconf is the daemon storing and providing most Xfce configuration values,
+called properties. Sadly, it is not possible to manipulate these values without
+building against libxfconf, which itself uses Glib, which I simply don't want
+and don't want to use, either as a C program or using FFI. The lazy way is to
+use xion-query, a modified build of the xfconf-query CLI tool.
+
+> Why don't you just use xfconf-query?
+
+It simply does not have a very machine-readable interface, so Xion uses a
+modified build to work smoothly, removing some output aimed at humans and adding
+value types to its output. I tried to make it easy to get xion-query.
+
+
+
+Installation
+------------
+
+### Get xion-query
+
+Builds of xion-query will be available on my [Xfconf fork][xfconf-fork] soon,
+but it already has building instructions (optional Docker build).
+
+### Get xion
+
+Right now Xion is not packaged, just download the repo.