How do I clean up my dconf database?

Question

Dconf is pretty young, yet my database is already a mess with lots of "schema-less" keys. Is there a way to do some cleaning up, or would I need to start from scratch (by removing ~/.config/dconf/user I guess)?

Answer 1

This is possible using the dconf reset command, though it's not clear if that's a side-effect of a bug.

• For a single key:

  dconf reset "/path/to/the/key"
  

  Must not end with a /.

• For a whole path:

  dconf reset -f "/path/to/the/path/"
  

  Must end with a /.

If you do this while having dconf-editor opened, it will likely crash.

Answer 2

If you want to clean the dconf database, you first have to dump the whole dconf configuration via:

morfik:~$ cd ~/.config/dconf/
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf dump / > user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ ls -al ./user-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 morfik morfik 30.0K 2015-02-07 08:18:04 ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ rm user

After those steps you have to reopen your graphical session (log out/in). This will create the ~/.config/dconf/user file anew with almost 0 content -- default settings.

As for the user-backup file you had created earlier, it's just a plain text file:

...
[apps/light-locker]
late-locking=false
lock-after-screensaver=uint32 1
lock-on-suspend=true
...

So you can edit it and remove the desired entries/blocks from that file. In other words -- clean it.

When you're done, load it:

morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf load / < ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ ls -al ./user-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 morfik morfik 14.0K 2015-02-07 08:26:23 ./user-backup
morfik:~/.config/dconf$ dconf update /

I think you should restart your graphical session after that again.

And that's it, but you have to remember that all entries that have default values wont be saved -- they will be created anew when some app will ask for it, which is a good thing because you want to backup only the values you had changed.

Answer 3

Install gconf-cleaner from the software center.
sudo apt-get install gconf-cleaner

In their own words "GConf Cleaner is a tool to clean your Gconf database up that is possibly cluttered with unnecessary or invalid keys."