Appendices
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. |