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Configuration

Editing Config

Aretext stores its configuration in a single YAML file. You can edit the config file using the editconfig flag:

aretext -editconfig

The configuration file is located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aretext/config.yaml, where XDG_CONFIG_HOME is configured according to the XDG Base Directory Specification. On Linux, this defaults to ~/.config, and on macOS it defaults to ~/Library/Application Support.

When you open the config file, you should see something like:

- name: default
  pattern: "**"
  config:
    autoIndent: false
    hideDirectories: [".git"]
    syntaxLanguage: plaintext
    tabExpand: false
    tabSize: 4
    showLineNumbers: false

- name: json
  pattern: "**/*.json"
  config:
    autoIndent: true
    syntaxLanguage: json
    tabExpand: true
    tabSize: 2
    showLineNumbers: true

Each item in the configuration file describes a rule. For example, in the snippet above, the first rule is named "default" and the second rule is named "json".

Each rule has a pattern. The "**" is a wildcard that matches any subdirectory, and "*" is a wildcard that matches zero or more characters in a file or directory name.

When aretext loads a file, it checks each rule in order. If the rule's pattern matches the file's absolute path, it applies the rule to update the configuration.

For example, if aretext loaded the file "foo/bar.json" using the above configuration, both rules would match the filename. The resulting configuration would be:

config:
  autoIndent: true           # from the "json" rule
  hideDirectories: [".git"]  # from the "default" rule
  syntaxLanguage: json       # from the "json" rule
  tabExpand: true            # from the "json" rule
  tabSize: 2                 # from the "json" rule
  showLineNumbers: true      # from the "json" rule

When merging configurations from different rules:

  • For strings and numbers, the values from later rules overwrite the values from previous rules.
  • For lists, the values from all rules are combined.
  • For dictionaries, the keys from later rules are added to the merged dictionary, potentially overwriting keys set by previous rules.

This is a powerful mechanism for customizing configuration based on filename extension and/or project location. For example, suppose that the style guidelines for a project mandate four spaces of indentation for JSON. You could add a new rule to your config that overwrites the tabSize for JSON files in that specific project:

# ... other rules above ...
- name: myproject json
  pattern: "**/myproject/**/*.json"
  config:
    tabSize: 4

Troubleshooting

Fixing errors on startup

If your YAML config file has errors, aretext will exit with an error message. You can force aretext to ignore the config file by passing the "-noconfig" flag:

aretext -editconfig -noconfig

This allows you to start the editor so you can fix the configuration.

Checking which rules were applied

To see which configuration rules aretext applied when loading a file, start aretext with logging enabled:

aretext -log debug.log

If you view the file debug.log, you should see lines like this:

Applying config rule 'default' with pattern '**' for path 'path/to/file.txt'

This tells you which rules aretext applied when opening a file, which can help you debug your configuration.

Configuration Reference

For a complete list of available configuration options, see Configuration Reference.