Bat: BAT_CONFIG_DIR not being honored on macOS?

[mcmillion]

I'm try to get a custom theme set up and I'd like to use ~/.config/bat as the location for these files. Here's what I'm seeing:

➜ echo $BAT_CONFIG_DIR
/Users/mcmillion/.config/bat

➜ bat cache --init
No themes were found in '/Users/mcmillion/Library/Preferences/bat/themes', using the default set
No syntaxes were found in '/Users/mcmillion/Library/Preferences/bat/syntaxes', using the default set.
Writing theme set to /Users/mcmillion/Library/Caches/bat/themes.bin ... okay
Writing syntax set to /Users/mcmillion/Library/Caches/bat/syntaxes.bin ... okay

➜ bat cache --config-dir
/Users/mcmillion/Library/Preferences/bat

BAT_CONFIG_PATH does seem to be working just fine, however. Am I just misunderstanding how this configuration option is supposed to work? I'd definitely like to keep things under ~/.config as that's the convention and having to symlink things to ~/Library on various machines feels wrong.

[sharkdp]

Thank you very much for the feedback.

BAT_CONFIG_DIR is a variable that I have used in the README to make the use of bat cache --config-dir clear. It is not actually a configuration option for bat (i.e. bat will never read this environment variable).

Currently, there is no way to control the directory where user-customized themes and syntaxes are found (Note that - perhaps confusingly - there is a BAT_CONFIG_PATH environment variable that can be used to control where bats configuration file is stored).

The discussion about ~/Library being used on macOS came up a few times in past tickets. I think we should simply change the default for macOS to be ~/.config/bat. Opinions?

[lavifb]

As far as I can tell, ~/Library is mostly used for regular GUI Mac apps. For command line applications like bat, usually you use ~/.config/bat or ~/.bat. I tend to prefer ~/.config/bat because otherwise your home directory gets very littered with config files.

[sharkdp]

Ok, let's change this to ~/.config/bat for all non-Windows OSes.

[lavifb]

To reply to the original question, would you consider either changing the variable name in the README or excluding it entirely (using maybe "$(bat cache --config-dir)/themes")? The current name in the example, BAT_CONFIG_DIR, is formatted like a configuration option which probably leads to the above confusion.

[sharkdp]

Sounds like a good idea. Let's remove it completely and "inline" $(bat cache --config-dir).

[sharkdp]

This issue has been resolved in #435. I'll open a second ticket for changing the config path to ~/.config/bat.