Personas

Ponos is a personal tool. There is really one human — me — but I run it in three distinct contexts, and each context needs something different from the tool.

The Operator (me, setting up a machine)

The person who runs sync_mac.sh interactively on a Mac to bring it to its target state — a brand-new laptop, or an existing one after changing the Brewfile or a dotfile.

• Goals: get from "fresh macOS" to "ready to code" without a checklist; re-sync at any time without fear of breaking what already works.
• Pain points: forgotten manual steps, half-configured machines, dotfiles that drift out of the repo, install steps that fail and leave the machine in an unknown state.
• What Ponos owes them: an idempotent run that is safe to repeat, clear coloured logging of what it did, automatic backups before overwriting anything, and graceful continuation when a single package fails.

The Automation (the same script, run unattended)

The same sync_mac.sh, driven without a keyboard — piped input, or a CI/provisioning job — where no one is there to answer prompts.

• Goals: run start-to-finish with zero interaction and deterministic choices.
• Pain points: a script that blocks on a read prompt forever, or picks a random default.
• What Ponos owes them: detection of a non-interactive shell (falls back to sensible defaults), and environment-variable overrides (PONOS_CONTAINER, PONOS_BROWSER) that bypass every prompt while still persisting the choice for next time.

The Daily Driver (me, using the machine afterwards)

The same person, now working on the configured machine and leaning on the shell environment and CLI helpers Ponos installed.

• Goals: keep repositories tidy (bclean, rfrom), roll out updated Git hooks everywhere (rhooks), free a stuck port (uport, kport), and commit within convention without thinking about it (template hooks).
• Pain points: piles of merged local branches, a port held by a zombie process, inconsistent commit messages, hooks that exist in one repo but not another.
• What Ponos owes them: short, memorable aliases with consistent coloured output, guard rails on dangerous Git actions (force push, pushing to a protected branch), and a one-command way to keep every repository's hooks in sync with the source of truth.