clink [conditional symlink farm]

clink is a conditional symlink farm manager. You can define features as described in Configuration, with a condition on whether directories tagged with this feature should be symlinked. This condition can either be all, the wanted OS (macos | linux) or a custom command.

Usage

clink link - creates symlinks based on clink.yaml in current directory

clink unlink [-l | --leave-orphans] - removes symlinks

Configuration

Clink is configured in a clink.yaml file.

ignore:     # ignore file or folder names, applies to all directories and subdirectories
  - .DS_Store

features:
  - slug: all
    enabled: all # all, macos, linux or custom command
    target: ~/   # location to symlink this feature to

  - slug: mac
    enabled: macos
    target: ~/

  - slug: mac-opt
    enabled: macos
    target: /opt/

  - slug: linux
    enabled: linux
    target: ~/

  - slug: custom
    # custom enabled commands have to be tagged with !command
    # the specified command needs to return exit code 0 to count as enabled
    enabled: !command /some/custom/script
    target: ~/
    
  - slug: linux_wayland
    target: ~/
    enabled: !command /bin/bash -c "if [[ $XDG_SESSION_TYPE -ne wayland ]] ; then exit 1 ; fi"

The content of directories matching the format {slug,slug,...}<name>, where at least one enabled feature matches a specified slug, gets symlinked to the target specified in the feature.

If multiple features are assigned, priority is determined by their order in the config file. (top - higher priority, bottom - lower priority)

Caveats

While other symlink farms like GNU stow perform "tree folding" to figure out where symlinking is most efficient, clink only symlinks files, creating non-existing parent directories in the process. This is somewhat mitigated by the default unlink behaviour, where clink removes all empty parent folders of a link, up until the target itself.

You can disable this by adding the -l (--leave-orphans) flag to unlink.