Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

A lot of filesystems don't store file creation dates. Posix only requires last modification date (which for directories, is the last time a file/subdirectory was added, removed, or renamed), last access date, and last status change date.

I think it's a nice idea, but don't like the media structure into family and so on. Looks like he's going to have a ton of problems with duplicates and then edited duplicates down the line, which can easily be mixed up, and then you lose your edits and so on.

Pictures are better sorted with EXIF keywords. So, metadata stored in the picture itself, perhaps even in the MIME type. Thus, if a picture is family related, just tag it #family, or #personx and so on. This is why I store them in the same folder on a per-date basis. The rest is keywords edited with programs such as Adobe Bridge and so on.

As for document file name structure, text files and the like, I've used both `Date then Descrpition.txt` or `Keyword Title or Description and then Date.txt` with the date obviously being an ISO date such that `YYYY-MM-DD-hhmm` with `-hhmm` being optional, also for sorting reasons. Sometimes I like sorting on "topics" i.e. keywords or titles, but other times, such as in logs, I like the date first because it's more essential to know when you logged something, and not necessarily the topic.

You should think the date is superfluous since it's also stored in the system. However, my experience that when you move around a file, the date eventually changes, and certainly if you make a mistake along the way. Meanwhile a filename date doesn't change. Also it helps with list sorting where applicable.

> What does $host mean?

In Go parlance, it would be the remote host where the repository is hosted, e.g. github.com, dev.azure.com, golang.org, etc.

> Why would I need that for a purely local project that is only created for my own use?

If nobody else is using your purely local project, and you're sure nobody will ever use it until the end of time, then I guess you could just use "~/src/$HOSTNAME/$USERNAME/$PROJECTNAME". Otherwise, it would be wise to setup a remote repository ahead of time.

Go has a strong opinion that, in this day and age of distributed computing, projects should be online-first, so they can be easily used as dependencies. One of the nice consequences of this opinion is that Go dependencies can just be specified in the import statement - e.g. using grpc dependency is just:

    import "google.golang.org/grpc"

No need for pom.xml, requirements.txt, cmake.txt, or any other kind of dependency configuration. It just works (unless it doesn't, like with private repositories, in which case it requires some exotic configurations in ~/.gitconfig or ~/.netrc, but that's a whole other can of worms - for most public repositories I've used it works flawlessly).

> And what about grouping projects? E.g. "personal", "work", etc.

Assuming you only use one repository hosting service and have one username, all your personal projects would be under "~/src/$PERSONAL_HOSTING_SERVICE/$USERNAME/", and your work would be under "~/src/$WORK_HOSTING_SERVICE/$WORK_ENTITY/" or something like this.

> And where in the structure are languages?

It isn't. That's either a bug or a feature. If it's a bug, you could just do the whole thing by language, e.g. "~/src/go/", "~/src/java/", etc.

For me the way I use is as follows:

Capital names for GUI things, lowercase names for CLI things. I'd prefer ~/documents, etc, but GUI people insist on capitalizing, so whatever. Very rarely I have to mix those, so it's not a big problem.

~/dotfiles is my dotfiles directory with git. I create ~/.zshrc -> dotfiles/zshrc, etc. I don't use any software to manage that, I just create symlinks. In the past I've used ~/.dotfiles but I think that making it visible makes more sense.

~/projects is my projects directory. ~/projects/test is throwaway test projects to check things out, etc. ~/projects/my is my personal projects. ~/projects/company is projects for company I'm working for. I'm kind of freelancer and sometimes work for different companies, so separation is necessary.

~/tmp is my throwaway directory for everything. I have shell function mkcdtmp which creates ~/tmp/240419 (current date) and cds into it. It's a wonderful way. I rarely clean it, because I prefer to buy big discs and keep trash around, somewhat organized. If I need something from yesterday or past month, I know where to find it. That's the most important thing I did for organizing my temp work which is plenty. Of course I can create ~/tmp/whatever if needed, it's all trash stuff.

Well, that's all, I guess. I don't use ~/Desktop. I rarely use ~/Documents, still need to find a way to organize it. Also I dump my short notes and stuff to my github repo which builds a personal website. I tried various notes software but ordinary website with markdown turned out the best way for me.

I never was able to organize my work in a very structured way, it's always piles of trash moving around which eventually turn into something usable, so instead of fighting myself I decided to make that trash organized.

Essentially my computer is disposable. Everything in ~/projects is in git. Everything in ~/tmp is not very important and more like a cache or discarded work. I'm trying to organize things in a way so restoring it from the clean state wouldn't take much time. I often reinstall OS from the scratch and I often switch between operating systems and laptops, that suits me best.

XDG isn't enforced, it's voluntary. So there will always be lots of applications not following it.