Appendices
Appendix C: Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Age | Modern file-encryption tool using X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305. Stores secrets in the repository encrypted at rest. |
| Agent Mode | One of ask, plan, apply, audit: how much an AI agent may do unattended. Defined in defaults/dot_config/dotfiles/agent-profiles.json; switched with dot agent mode set. |
| 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 | Unsigned JSON evidence of a workstation's dotfiles version, platform, Git signing setup, agent mode and MCP policy at a point in time (dot attest show). |
| Baseline (security) | Reference state used by detect-secrets to distinguish new leaks from known acceptable patterns. |
| Chaos | Intentional corruption (scripts/ops/chaos.sh) used to verify dot doctor fix 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. |
| Heal | The dot doctor fix 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. |
| Prewarm | dot shell update --prewarm regenerates shell init caches, eliminating slow first-shell startup. |
| Profile | The profile value in ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml ([data]), falling back to defaults/.chezmoidata.toml (default laptop), read by templates as .profile. Shown with dot config profile show, changed with dot config profile set. |
| Prompt Pattern | A reusable Markdown prompt for AI agents (e.g. architect, hardener) in defaults/dot_config/ai/patterns/. Listed with dot ai pattern list. |
| 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. |