> a command-line tool is not the system or an app Meh. An application is an application.
Nope. In macOS, "app" has specific meaning -- implying plist file, etc. See discussion elsewhere in the comments above.
macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
111–120 of 223 posts
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#112Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#113None of the tools the author mentions as following XDG, actually follow XDG. No default tools shipped with macOS place files under .config or anything like that. There is a bunch of dotfile vomit in $HOME and that's it. Every tool that uses .config is one you manually install from an external source. The XDG spec is to coordinate the userspace of Linux software , meaning both CLI apps and windowed apps. Linux needs t…
> The standardized location is Library. Except for Zsh (~/.zshrc), SSH (~/.ssh/config), Vim (~/.vimrc), Curl (~/.curlrc), Git (~/.gitconfig). Apple could have chosen to patch these and move the configuration files into ~/Library if they really wanted.
Apple rarely edits how big open source tools work in such a blunt way. I am not saying these tools' behavior is blessed by Apple. I'm just saying that TFA's assertion that 'these tools use .config so it's already standard' is not true - they don't. Unless you are saying that Apple is endorsing dotfile vomit outside of any particular folder.
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#114None of the tools the author mentions as following XDG, actually follow XDG. No default tools shipped with macOS place files under .config or anything like that. There is a bunch of dotfile vomit in $HOME and that's it. Every tool that uses .config is one you manually install from an external source. The XDG spec is to coordinate the userspace of Linux software , meaning both CLI apps and windowed apps. Linux needs t…
> [...] Linus has not bothered to write them down himself [...]
He's a kernel hacker and a technical leader. He doesn't write specs for the userspace, that's the least of his concerns. Linux has very strong guarantees on syscall backwards compat - Go doesn't even use libc. This is all by design.
Even the name "GNU/Linux" was something FSF tried to impose on distributions. The distributions being distributions, were free to brand themselves as they willed, which is 100% fair under the license terms.
This ecosystem has always been a bazaar, if that's not for you - use a BSD. (e.g. macOS.)
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#115None of the tools the author mentions as following XDG, actually follow XDG. No default tools shipped with macOS place files under .config or anything like that. There is a bunch of dotfile vomit in $HOME and that's it. Every tool that uses .config is one you manually install from an external source. The XDG spec is to coordinate the userspace of Linux software , meaning both CLI apps and windowed apps. Linux needs t…
git supports XDG - its config lives in `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config`. Though a lot of people still use the older location of ~/.gitconfig
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#116None of the tools the author mentions as following XDG, actually follow XDG. No default tools shipped with macOS place files under .config or anything like that. There is a bunch of dotfile vomit in $HOME and that's it. Every tool that uses .config is one you manually install from an external source. The XDG spec is to coordinate the userspace of Linux software , meaning both CLI apps and windowed apps. Linux needs t…
> [...] Linus has not bothered to write them down himself [...] He's a kernel hacker and a technical leader. He doesn't write specs for the userspace, that's the least of his concerns. Linux has very strong guarantees on syscall backwards compat - Go doesn't even use libc. This is all by design. Even the name "GNU/Linux" was something FSF tried to impose on distributions. The distributions being distributions, were f…
This is not a judgment. It is simply a fact. Linux uses cross-distribution standards, because of this fact; these standards should not be misidentified as cross-platform standards - which I believe TFA was doing - as that's not the purpose they exist for.
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My personal practice when writing command line utiities for macOS is to use the macOS API to write settings (previously known as “preferences”) into ~/Library/Preferences This would mean that essentially all edits to the configuration must be performed by the CLI tool itself? Because macOS preferences aren't really intended to be edited directly by the user. That feels like a totally different category of configura…
Yes, ideally the tool should edit its own preferences. A quick and dirty tool might leave the user to run the macOS "defaults" command line utility themselves. It’s certainly no worse than looking up the dotfile format and firing up vi.
In what world is this user hostile behavior ideal? There is no way you can write a cli tool that is more ergonomic in editing plain-texty config format than a good code editor!
> It’s certainly no worse
It's much worse, you don't get persistent undo from previous edits, indication of current changed and committed data, syntax highlighting, regex search, etc, etc.
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#118Put me in the disagree camp. The XDG spec seems like it is for X windowing-based systems, not the Mac, so that's not a reason to adopt. The author asserts what users expect, but without any evidence. FWIW, it's not what I expect. I used Linux and Solaris extensively between 1995-2005 or so and have been a terminal using Mac user since Mac OS X public beta. My expectation is honestly that CLI programs will do whatever…
I expect _applications_ to put their config there, as the author says; something that lives in /Applications or ~/Applications and has a bundle specifier.
I wish I expected CLI programs to put their config in ~/.config, but I do actually expect them to just dump them into ~ annoyingly
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#119None of the tools the author mentions as following XDG, actually follow XDG. No default tools shipped with macOS place files under .config or anything like that. There is a bunch of dotfile vomit in $HOME and that's it. Every tool that uses .config is one you manually install from an external source. The XDG spec is to coordinate the userspace of Linux software , meaning both CLI apps and windowed apps. Linux needs t…
git supports XDG - its config lives in `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config`. Though a lot of people still use the older location of ~/.gitconfig
It will load config from there, if you manually create it there. If on a freshly initialized system you say `git config --global push.autoSetupRemote true`, it will write it to .gitconfig; it will not use .config unprompted.
Re: macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
#120I disagree with this.
macOS isn't Linux, and as much as I _absolutely support_ the XDG BaseDir spec, I don't think it's fair to try and apply it to macOS. Linux has no 'proper' directory for storing configuration, cache and application user data. macOS and Windows _do_. It's only proper to support those systems in the way that they intend. I wouldn't put stuff in to `%HOME%\.config` on Windows any more than I would put data in `$HOME/.Application Data/Local/` on Linux. Why would macOS get bundled in with Linux? Because it's a unix? That's silly.
Personally, I have my zsh config repoint those directories into `~/Library/Application Data`, though (as some have pointed out) it's probably better to put some of those folders in `~/Library/Preferences`.