Table of contents

• What you can do with it

• Installation

• Configuration

• Development

What you can do with it

The dotbot-windows plugin is able to configure Windows in the following ways:

• Configure the desktop background color

• Import registry files (*.reg) from a specified directory

Sample configuration:

windows:
  personalization:
    background-color: "#2A4661"

  registry:
    import: "my-registry-tweaks/"

  fonts:
    path: "my-standard-fonts/"

Installation

There are two ways to install and use the plugin:

1. Install it as a Python package.

2. Add it as a git submodule in your dotfiles repository.

3. Copy dotbot_windows.py into your dotfiles directory.

pip install dotbot-windows

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot_windows [...]

git submodule add https://github.com/kurtmckee/dotbot-windows.git

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot-windows/dotbot_windows.py [...]

git submodule update --init dotbot-windows

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot_windows.py [...]

dotbot [...] --plugin-dir dotbot-plugins [...]

Configuration

Personalization

You can configure the desktop background color using a hexadecimal color (like "#2A4661") or a triplet of decimal RGB values (like "0 153 255").

Here are examples demonstrating the two formats:

windows:
    personalization:
        background-color: "#2A4661"

windows:
    personalization:
        background-color: "42 70 97"

Registry

You can import registry files by specifying a directory containing *.reg files. The directory will be recursively searched for *.reg files, and each of them will be imported.

Note that registry imports may fail if the changes require administrator privileges.

Here’s a dotbot configuration file example:

windows:
    registry:
        import: "registry-export-files"

Fonts

Starting with Windows 10 build 17704, users can install fonts without admin permissions. The fonts can be copied into "%LOCALAPPDATA%/Microsoft/Windows/Fonts", so this plugin replaces that directory with a symlink to a directory of your choosing.

Here’s a dotbot configuration file example:

windows:
  fonts:
    path: "my-standard-fonts/"

Development

To set up a development environment, clone the dotbot-windows plugin’s git repository. Then, follow these steps to create a virtual environment and run the unit tests locally:

# Create the virtual environment
$ python -m venv .venv

# Activate the virtual environment (Windows-only)
$ & .venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1

# Update pip and setuptools, and install wheel
(.venv) $ pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

# Install poetry, tox, and scriv
(.venv) $ pip install poetry tox scriv

# Install all dependencies
(.venv) $ poetry install

# Run the unit tests locally
(.venv) $ tox