Having come up with a light structure and kept it for 7 years now, mine is: media, life, edu, data, dev, pix The most heavily structured is /edu, everything else is a shitshow but I generally know where to find stuff. There are a few others that are dead. I don't bother putting dotfiles into this, but I probably should. I try to minimize directories with the same first letter for faster tab completion.
What type of files do you keep in edu?
Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
11–20 of 172 posts
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#12I remember I deleted a built-in directory like "Documents", and it lost its custom document icon, even when I created a "Documents" directory anew. No amount of googling / asking forums and IRC could bring my custom icon back. :) (Linux Mint, Cinnamon)
https://man.archlinux.org/man/user-dirs.dirs.5.en
If you delete one folder the file $HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs will be updated sooner or later, and point to $HOME/ and the icon will not be restored by recreating any folder.
Just change the values in there to whatever.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#13The “user-dirs.dir” setting is something I didn’t know was configurable. I thought I was always stuck with ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, …
Have slowly been using nixos as my primary driver (still in an emulated vm though). One thing I love here is the declarative nature. Lately have been experimenting with various desktop environments. I tried gnome and “it works” but have been fascinated with the idea of “ricing” my setup.
Currently using a Wayland compositor called hyprland to achieve something like this: https://github.com/outfoxxed/hy3?tab=readme-ov-file#demo
Community has experienced some drama though with fdo/x/wlroots. Always willing to make a change up if a better alt comes up though.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#14Having come up with a light structure and kept it for 7 years now, mine is: media, life, edu, data, dev, pix The most heavily structured is /edu, everything else is a shitshow but I generally know where to find stuff. There are a few others that are dead. I don't bother putting dotfiles into this, but I probably should. I try to minimize directories with the same first letter for faster tab completion.
What type of files do you keep in edu?
My Zotero database, thesis, and classes split up by semester with short names.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#15One major complaint I have with file systems is that too many directories start with the letter “D”.
Desktop, Dev, Downloads, Documents, Dropbox etc.
I thought about taking action about this, but as the author points about, many applications are quite opinionated on the matter.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#16Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#17I have found it surprizingly difficult to categorize my files in a way that is elegant and intuitive. I've been meaning to look into FUSE for a tagging-based system instead of the current hierarchical one, although I suspect that the difficulty of categorizing things is unlikely to go away even with tags.
I am genuinely surprised tagging never got more traction in the native FS space. I use MacOS's tagging pretty extensively and Dropbox at least keeps them in sync, a lot of other services lose them.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#18> easily and quickly find what you're
Yes, that's why due to yet another totally unrelated quirk of history you
> have all the basic hidden stuff which ... such as .config
> but I only leave those dotfiles in place which work identically across the different systems I use
or you can use a better solution like chezmoi config manager and have templates to allow you to store changes even for those files while retaining the history of changes
But the most important piece of advice is missing: get an Everything-like utility (fsearch is a worse alternative on Linux) and bind it to an easy shortcut, that'd be very often the fastest way to find any file and not have to remember all those folder hierarchies (not that they aren't useful)
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#19One major complaint I have with file systems is that too many directories start with the letter “D”. Desktop, Dev, Downloads, Documents, Dropbox etc. I thought about taking action about this, but as the author points about, many applications are quite opinionated on the matter.
I use `/src` to avoid this problem
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#20The only things in my home directory (note: I use Windows, but the convention still applies) are stuff that demand to be in there, like savegame files and software like Discord which demand to reside in %appdata% or else.
My stuff are found literally everywhere but, usually in their own drives and partitions.