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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

The problem I find with Firefox is that options in about:config are too stateful.

You can't use user.js as a regular dotfile such as .emacs, .vimrc or .muttrc. That is, once you set an option you need to manually unset it. I wished they introduced a more sane mechanism.

Besides, there is no way to programmatically declare you want to use some addons.

IMHO, all this makes maintaining relatively complex user configurations very costly.

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I use https://yadm.io to manage my dotfiles.

What I did was created a fork, ie https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-desktop

Then I added it as a submodule, ie "yadm submodule add ..." as they mention here https://stackoverflow.com/a/18797720

Yadm allows for a bootstrap[0], so I simply do:

   ln -sf ~/.config/firefox/chrome/userChrome.css ~/.mozilla/firefox/$FIREFOX_PROFILE.default/chrome/userChrome.css
   git --git-dir=/home/{{ YADM_USER }}/.config/firefox/ghacks-user.js/.git --work-tree=/home/{{ YADM_USER }}/.config/firefox/ghacks-user.js checkout fx-desktop
   cp ~/.config/firefox/ghacks-user.js/user.js ~/.mozilla/firefox/$FIREFOX_PROFILE.default/user.js

Note the Jinja2[1] syntax there.

[0]: https://yadm.io/docs/bootstrap [1]: https://yadm.io/docs/alternates

Yes, I find the about:config option stickiness behaviour isn't intuitive. I am guessing that a lot of people don't realize that if you set options in user.js they stay set until you manually unset them, even if you remove the user.js file.

You can't use user.js that way. You can use about:config that way. In about:config, resetting to default is easier than editing.

I don't understand, what would you want, exactly?

Options that can be set only for the duration of the current session?

Yes. In Emacs, if I setq some variable it doesn't stay set forever. In particular, not after I remove the setq statement.

A hack around this would be to remove things by specifically unsetting them in the user.js file, much as one would do to remove a previously installed package using configuration management software.

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