Motivation
I have completed the lifecycle of the Linux power user, from GNOME to KDE to 3 or 4 different tiling window managers, back to GNOME. However, though I'm now on the other side, I still want to configure my desktop with version-controlled text files. GNOME doesn't make this easy, since its configuration lives in a binary database.
The most basic solution uses the dconf command:
$ dconf dump / > config.ini $ dconf load / < config.ini
This is excessive, since it grabs every entry in the database. I want the behaviour of GNOME to be consistent between all the machines I use it on, but there is some information in this database that should remain local to a given machine. After a quick web search, I found that Ansible appeared to be the best recommended approach for creating a granular set of configurations. I, however, wanted to keep things minimal, so I wrote a small shell script that achieves all the automation I need.
How it works
~/dots/gnome/ ├── org.gnome.desktop.input-sources. ├── org.gnome.desktop.wm. ├── org.gnome.mutter. ├── org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys. ├── org.gnome.shell.app-switcher.current-workspace-only └── org.gnome.shell.extensions.paperwm.winprops
The configuration database follows a tree-based hierarchy, with most configuration under /org/gnome/. Each file in dots/gnome corresponds to a "directory" or a "file" in the database, depending on whether the filename ends with a dot; the mapping between database path and filename is achieved with character substitution of / and .. This mixed approach is useful because sometimes I want to manage a large number of related configuration options (e.g. /org/gnome/desktop/wm/ has all my window management keybindings), while other times I just need to modify one variable (such as /org/gnome/shell/app-switcher/current-workspace-only).
With these files in place, I can execute gnome-settings.sh [load|dump] to synchronise the contents of the files and the corresponding database entries.