Alacritty moving towards configuration with TOML format

[oceanlewis]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

This isn't a "bug" exactly, but it looks like the Alacritty project is looking at migrating away from using YAML as their configuration language to TOML, which will break programs.alacritty.settings.

I don't think nixpkgs has a builtin.toTOML, but it's easy enough for me to get around this by using nushell's from yaml | to toml functionality. Probably there are better ways to fix this though.

See alacritty/alacritty#6673 for where this work is happening.

Maintainer CC

@timhae @rycee @berbiche @ncfavier

System information

N/A

[ncfavier]

Thanks for the heads-up. It looks like upstream will continue supporting YAML for some time so we can have a graceful transition.

Should be as simple as changing pkgs.formats.yaml to pkgs.formats.toml, and maybe that will be a good time to revisit this TODO. I think we can do the backslash substitution as a postBuild on the generated toml file, if that's still needed. See #611 (comment)

[jperras]

Tangentially related: Alacritty has already introduced a non-standard YAML import directive, which allows a YAML file to import another YAML file. One of the drivers of this was for colorscheme themes: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme#imports

The reason I mention this: the current approach of converting the YAML-based configuration to JSON fails when including an import: in your Alacritty configuration.

[kchibisov]

Tangentially related: Alacritty has already introduced a non-standard YAML import directive, which allows a YAML file to import another YAML file. One of the drivers of this was for colorscheme themes: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme#imports

It's a simple array of strings which is called import, it could be called whatever and is a plain yaml array with strings. Those strings we use as a source of other configurations which we manually merge.

foo:
  - "./foo1.yml"
  - "./foo2.yml"

[tobiasbaehr]

btw. when you enable alacritty via home manager, then it generates json for alacritty.yml.

I do not believe this is valid. ;-)

[rycee]

@tobiasbaehr YAML is a superset of JSON so any valid JSON is also valid YAML so we have historically used Nix's builtin toJSON function also for YAML output.

[kchibisov]

Should be as simple as changing pkgs.formats.yaml to pkgs.formats.toml, and maybe that will be a good time to revisit this TODO. I think we can do the backslash substitution as a postBuild on the generated toml file, if that's still needed. See #611 (comment)

@ncfavier we've updated the config to use toml, though. While there's no release with it, I wonder how to handle escaping (given how obscure nix docs are). For yml there was a conversion to string, but there's no toTOML function, so just using pkgs.format.toml is not enough, since \u can't be translated by any input syntax.

[ncfavier]

I think the easiest would be something like

pkgs.runCommand "alacritty-unescaped.toml" {} ''
  sed -E 's/\\(\\[uU])/\1/g' ${toml.generate "alacritty.toml" settings} > "$out"
''

Though maybe alacritty could take care of interpreting backslash sequences itself in the relevant options? (Does it ever make sense to have a literal backslash in keybindings?)

[kchibisov]

It's not about just keybindings, you can define arbitrary regexes to search, so user can type whatever they want, it's just an issue that you can't generate toml with \u no matter how you try with nix (unless you sed).

[kchibisov]

Besides, you'd need a

sed -E 's/\\\\/\\/g'

Otherwise other \ commands won't translate from the way it was with yml (at least my config required that to translate).

[VergeDX]

Maybe we can make an option of format? Because TOML theme not capable with YAML format config.
In my case theme https://github.com/rose-pine/alacritty uses TOML format, but hm still generate YAML.

[ncfavier]

The TOML change has not been released yet. If you're using alacritty master, feel free to open a PR and use it and we'll merge it when the release hits nixpkgs.

[oxalica]

I don't think nixpkgs has a builtin.toTOML

That can be implemented in Nix. I created a PR in nixpkgs: NixOS/nixpkgs#243390

[stale]

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[Airradda]

As of Alacritty Version 0.13.0, the configuration file format is now TOML.

Configuration file now uses TOML instead of YAML
Run alacritty migrate to automatically convert all configuration files

[flaturtha]

I upgraded this morning and when I tried to run alacritty migrate, I got the following error: "Configuration file migration failed:
"/home/h/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml": parsing error: Yaml conversion error: unsupported unit type"

I'm not an expert but am trying to learn. Therefore, I'm obviously missing something but am unsure how to proceed. Googling hasn't help. Nor did ChatGPT! :-)

[kchibisov]

it means that the old config was not valid in the first place, as in wrong section alignments, etc.

[flaturtha]

Yeah, I figured something like that but I don't believe I ever changed it. Is there a standard file I can use?

[kchibisov]

man 5 alacritty or alacritty.org.

[flaturtha]

gee, thanks for helping a noob

[ncfavier]

Fixed by #4817

[n8henrie]

@rycee @ncfavier -- could this be considered for backporting to 23.11? As it has the version check built-in I think it should be compatible.

I'm happy to test, though I'm not entirely sure how -- actually it looks like I should be able to use disabledModules for this. Should be able to try tomorrow and report back.

(I am pinned to release-23.11 for my system as a whole but use a handful of unstable packages for development, including alacritty.)

[n8henrie]

I can confirm that the updated programs.alacritty works on 23.11 with alacritty <0.13 (generates yml) as well as alacritty >= 13 (generates toml) and avoid the warning message in both cases.

Can a backport be considered?

For other readers, this I have a home-manager-unstable flake input in my otherwise 23.11-pinned configuration, and I pass that input via specialArgs

{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  config,
  ...
} @ args: {
imports = [
    "${args.inputs.home-manager-unstable}/modules/programs/alacritty.nix"
];
disabledModules = ["programs/alacritty.nix"];
}