Command line export/import

[metasean]

(A) I 💟 Rectangle!

(B) I just learned about the cli only configs —some of which I've wanted to be able to do for a while— and now I've found out just how to do it.

(C)
For reasons, I've had to set-up new machines for myself on a regular basis at work. I've finally gotten frustrated enough that I'm starting to automate the process (combo of shell script, ansible config, and brew installs from the ansible config).

Someone was kind enough to already create a brew formula for rectangle. But I'd also like to be able to automate the process of maintaining my set-up process (i.e. to export my Rectangle config from a script) as well as automating the set-up itself (i.e. importing my Rectangle config from a script.).

Y'all have already done a great job just by having the export and import options!!!
Are there command line ways to run them?
If not, can y'all add them? 🙏

[rxhanson]

Thanks for the feedback.

The easiest way is to just copy over the NSUserDefaults, which is where the preferences are persisted. The import/export in Rectangle ultimately is just reading/writing those anyway. See the Preferences Storage section in the readme: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle#preferences-storage

[rxhanson]

@mavam Thanks for the feedback. I see no reason to turn down a good PR where Rectangle reads from a directory as mentioned. Seems like it wouldn't be a big deal to look in multiple places as long as the automatic read is in place. However, I will say that it would seem rather odd if it read from a file but did not write back out to it when config changes, since restarting the app would then re-read that config unless there's logic specifically for telling it to not read it again (which would seem more confusing then just writing back out config as it is modified).

[mavam]

Glad to know you are open to this behavior. I'm fully with you that a symmetric approach makes most sense, covering reads and writes. Unlike Rectangle, many terminal applications simply don't need the write path, because their config gets only loaded once at startup.

[Nbelles]

I have almost the same exact same use case as the original poster. After installing via brew, to get the application going, I have a command open -a /Applications/Rectangle.app so that it goes ahead and starts running the app. It would be nice if we could do a similar thing but tack on a path to a .json file with the configuration that was exported before. What I think this could look like: open -a /Applications/Rectanle.app ~/Downloads/RectangleConfig.json That would make it just that much easier to get up and running with a new install.

[yoaquim]

Was this ever implemented?

[rxhanson]

It was not. At the moment, I don't have the bandwidth for it, but I can point someone to the right place for starting on it (shouldn't be too hard).