Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories.

XDG gang, rise up!

Also, I know that this community and dot-files in general are Unix based, but this holds true for Windows development as well. You should be putting app files in the users' %APPDATA% directory, not their user folder. It's probably even more important since Windows doesn't autohide dot files.

I just write my config files directly to random unused blocks on /dev/sda, filesystems are overrated.

I absolutely despise the following directories: Documents, Music, Pictures, Public, Templates, Videos. Why? Because applications randomly dump stuff into these directories and fill them with junk files. I don't want any application putting anything into directories I actually use, unless I explicitly tell them to. It is not possible to keep your files organized if applications randomly dump trash files into them.

Y'know what's worse? When there's no dot. Worse than that, it's an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒

If you care, please take time to upvote or file bugs on packages that don't follow XDG. Or even better, make PRs.

One of my greatest pet peeves is random folders appearing in my home folder. Thanks for this

The rust library mentioned there doesn’t support system install paths for windows or macOS, it only uses XDG. I recommend the directories crate which properly supports Linux, Mac, and Windows.

https://github.com/dirs-dev/directories-rs

You might wanna backup your dotfiles somewhere remote too. I literally lost dotfiles that I'd been building up for years because I couldn't remember the password to my Linux machine after coming back from vacation. Funny enough though, a couple hours after nuking my OS I magically remember my password.

Me staring aggressively at Steam, Zotero, and bash:

(And more)

And wtf is with anaconda3 just permanently changing your "user@machine" terminal prompt?? Who thought that was a good idea?

My $HOME is my castle (・へ・)

Tangentially related: I recently learned that there are tools for handling dotfiles such as chezmoi and yadm. I would suppose that after spending some time on backing up the dotfiles that matter one can purge the remainders without much issue. I also remember some tool that was made for the purpose of cleaning $HOME, but can not recall its name (if anyone knows please let me know).

.word

I hate it when an application puts its configuration data in its own dotfile under $HOME instead in ~/.config. Also hate it when caches are stored in ~/.config, because then I have to manually tag those subdirectories for exclusion before doing a backup.

Yes please!

Also if the normal invocation of your program produces more than 3k lines of stdout, sanitize it and default to a file.

A user may want to back it up as an important part of their system, control it’s permissions,

control its* permissions

I'd like to set nautilus to show hidden files, but I can't stand the amount of "trash" there's in home

Everyone is thinking "my app is the best, it totally deserves a ~/.myappisthebest directory"

W should make a .dotfiles directory for them.

Great read, thanks for sharing this!

It needed to be said.

Is there any good gui application for mange these but also edit them in a user friendly way like getting a dropdown for a settings like: Yes/No, Country Sweden. Number size range etc. So include validation. Even nix os does not have that.

I'm new to Linux. Should I be using something like chezmoi?

Some bin folder in home folder?

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Hmmmmmm

No.

Here is nice help for python software to determine XDG directories (and more): https://pyxdg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basedirectory.html

PyXDG contains implementations of freedesktop.org standards in python.

Someone should pass this on to valve.

Cough Snap cough

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