dotfiles/.config/dot/.claude/tasks/0012-folders-fixed-target-mapping.md

spec, blocked-by

spec	blocked-by
dot-setup-folders	0011-folders-unconditional-merge

What to build

Stop reading the short-name target from ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and hardcode the legacy-name -> short-name mapping directly in _dot_setup_folders, dropping the dependency on that file entirely.

The original design treated the tracked user-dirs.dirs as the single source of truth for target names, assuming someone would hand-edit it to the short names before ever running the command. On this machine that never happened: the tracked file still had the stock XDG defaults (XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents", etc.), so target_path resolved to the exact same directory as legacy_path for every folder. The migration logic then reported every entry as a "collision" against itself instead of moving anything -- a confusing, silent-feeling failure rather than an actual migration.

The short names are fixed (.desktop, doc, dwn, mus, pic, vid, .ignoreme) and not meant to be configurable, so there's nothing to read from a file in the first place. user-dirs.dirs remains a separate, manually tracked dotfile (edited and tracked by hand, like any other dotfile) for apps/xdg-user-dirs-update to consult -- dot setup folders itself no longer reads it, requires its presence, or writes to it.

Acceptance criteria

• _dot_setup_folders no longer reads, parses, or requires ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs; the legacy->short-name mapping is a fixed table in the function itself
• Migration works identically whether user-dirs.dirs is absent, empty, or declares stale/full-name values (the exact real-world case)
• user-dirs.dirs is left byte-for-byte untouched by dot setup folders when present, and no file is created when absent
• dot setup folders help no longer describes reading target names from user-dirs.dirs
• ~/.config/dot/tests/dot.fish no longer seeds a user-dirs.dirs fixture as a migration precondition, and covers the stale/missing cases above; fishtape ~/.config/dot/tests/dot.fish passes

Implementation Notes

• Replaced the xdg_vars/grep/string match parsing of user-dirs.dirs with two parallel hardcoded arrays, legacy_names and target_names, indexed together -- same shape the code already used for legacy_names alone, just extended to cover the target side too.
• The early if not test -f $user_dirs; return 1 guard was deleted outright rather than kept as a soft check: there's nothing left for the function to read from that file, so requiring its existence would just be a vestigial, unjustifiable precondition.
• Removed the short_name_user_dirs fixture and its seeding step from every test scenario (it was previously duplicated into ~15 scenarios as a migration precondition); added two new scenarios instead: one reproducing the exact real-machine bug (stale full-name user-dirs.dirs values) and one confirming migration works with no user-dirs.dirs file at all.
• Verified against this machine's real, still-stale ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs via _dot_setup_folders --dry-run: previously reported every entry in Desktop/Documents/Downloads/Pictures/Videos as a collision against itself; now correctly reports would move N entries from ~/Documents to ~/doc etc.
• fishtape ~/.config/dot/tests/dot.fish passes (183 tests).