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Appendix C: Glossary

Term Definition
Age Modern file-encryption tool using X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305. Stores secrets in the repository encrypted at rest.
Agent Profile A named behaviour template for AI agents (e.g. architect, hardener). Stored in dot_config/ai/patterns/.
ANSI Colors The 16 foreground/background color slots (c0 through c15) used by terminal emulators.
Apple Desktop APR XMP metadata in dynamic HEIC wallpapers mapping image indices to light/dark appearance modes.
Attestation Signed JSON document asserting machine identity, policy, tool versions, and Git state at a point in time.
Baseline (security) Reference state used by detect-secrets to distinguish new leaks from known acceptable patterns.
Chaos Intentional corruption (dot chaos) used to verify dot heal recovers to a healthy state.
Chezmoi The templating engine handling per-platform rendering and applying configuration to $HOME.
CIELAB Color space designed for perceptual uniformity. Used by the theme engine for K-Means clustering.
CycloneDX SBOM format used by the repository for machine-readable dependency inventories.
Dank Material Shell (DMS) A shell for the Niri Wayland compositor that provides polished theming hooks.
Drift Local changes to managed files that diverge from the source tree. Detected by dot status.
Dynamic HEIC Apple's single-file wallpaper format that contains both light and dark variants with appearance metadata.
Fleet Two or more workstations sharing a single .dotfiles source repository.
Gitleaks Secret-pattern scanner that blocks commits containing obvious secret patterns.
Golden Ratio 1.618... Used as the target brightness ratio between dark and light theme variants.
Heal The dot heal command's action of auto-fixing drift, missing tools, and broken symlinks.
Idempotent Property where running an operation twice has the same result as running it once.
K-Means Clustering algorithm partitioning data into k groups by proximity to centroids. Used for dominant color extraction.
K-Means++ Variant of K-Means with smart initialization that reduces sensitivity to random seeding.
MCP Model Context Protocol — standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data.
Mise User-space language and tool version manager. Replaces asdf, nvm, rbenv, pyenv.
Nix Flakes Nix's reproducible-build system. Used for strict repeatability when Mise's approximations aren't enough.
Niri Wayland compositor with scrollable tiling layout.
Policy Hash SHA-256 of the active MCP policy JSON. Included in attestations for drift detection.
Prewarm dot prewarm regenerates shell init caches, eliminating slow first-shell startup.
Profile Named collection of settings in .chezmoidata.toml selectable via dot profile.
SOPS "Secrets OPerationS" — YAML-aware envelope encryption tool that wraps Age (or PGP/AWS KMS).
SBOM Software Bill of Materials — machine-readable dependency list, generated by Syft, scanned by Grype.
Trust Anchor The root public key from which all other trust derives. For .dotfiles, the user's SSH ED25519 signing key.
WCAG AAA Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AAA — 7:1 text contrast ratio, the highest accessibility tier.
XDG Base Directory Spec defining ~/.config, ~/.cache, ~/.local/share, ~/.local/state for app data locations.