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

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it's a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won't work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is "not secure", you're probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don't start with a dot in people's home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

• A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user's home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

• WINE apparently has decided that it's a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

• Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

• A few logfiles

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.

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

Me staring aggressively at Steam, Zotero, and bash:

(And more)

Nix and Home Manager have been my go-to for managing dotfiles and symlinks in my home dir

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).

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!

.word

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

control its* permissions

Someone should pass this on to valve.