For a number of reasons, I like to keep my configuration in plain text. Plain text can be edited with my favorite text editor, and it can be version controlled with the same tools as source code.

I am also a fan of the GNOME desktop. GNOME uses the gsettings API for configuration; theoretically, this API could be directly backed by plain text paths. For performance reasons, however, dconf was created to back this API.

dconf is basically a hierarchical {dictionary,map,hash-table}, with /unix/style/paths, each path containing some number of key-value pairs. Most of the time, the dconf database is compiled onto disk as a raw datastructure, and mmap’d in for lightning speed lookup.

I can use the following command to write out the dconf database recursively as plain text, starting from the root:

dconf dump / > ~/.config/dconf/user.d/everything.conf

The result of the dump looks something like the following:

[org/gnome/settings-daemon/peripherals/keyboard]
repeat-interval=uint32 27
delay=uint32 318

[org/gnome/desktop/input-sources]
xkb-options=['caps:ctrl_modifier']

Of course, most of the settings in dconf are irrelevant to me, or are machine specific. I want to find the ones that I actually care about. I can do this by grepping the dump from dconf, or dumping sub-paths.

dconf dump / | grep terminal > ~/.config/dconf/user.d/myterminalsettings.conf
dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal

The paths tab-complete, so it’s easy to do some exploration with the latter option. However, the latter option dumps only partial paths, so you’d need to edit it before loading it back in. (Or dump it to a nested directory and develop a more elaborate script for loading that uses find(1)…)

It’s a bit silly to manually guess at which configuration option is which. So another option is to watch the dconf database as it changes:

dconf watch /

Now change a setting with the graphical interface, and it’ll be printed to STDOUT! You’ll have to do a small bit of munging to get this into the same format as dconf dump prints, though. It might be simpler to just dump the path printed.

After narrowing down the dump, I delete the settings that I don’t care about, and neatly comment and arrange the rest in multiple files in ~/.config/dconf/user.d/. You can see my configuration at my dotfiles repo on Github.

Now, if I want to load those settings back in, it’s simple:

cat ~/.config/dconf/user.d/* | dconf load /

I actually really like this approach. I can have all the nice features of a plain text configuration, without the overhead.

There is also an option, built in to dconf, to store the configuration as plain text, monitor those files for changes, and compile them progressively at runtime into the fast binary file that it uses by default. This is designed to support filesystems where mmap doesn’t work well. (like NFS) Unfortunately, using this requires changing files in etc at the moment, which I wanted to avoid. It would be useful if someone would add support for enabling this from =~.config=.