just put everything on the desktop, then its all in one place.
Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
21–30 of 172 posts
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#22 calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head
.
├── 2022
│ ├── 04
│ │ ├── 19
so i open my shell, it drops me into ~/t/, which is symlinked to ~/work/YYYY/DD/MM.
my GTK file picker is also setup to automatically give me the last 3 days on the bookmark bar.
Time is not the _best_ heuristic, but it's not bad.
screenshots from scrot all get dumped into ~/screenshots/ by date.
the only real 'folders' i keep around are ~/src/, ~/bin/ and ~/documents/, with the last being like, tax documents.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#23I 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.
The problem I have is that the optimal categorization seems to change depending on my current job and life situation. Tagging requires a whole new level of discipline ...
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#24To alleviate the issue with most applications dumping their files in your home directory, i found xdg-ninja[0] to be helpful.
In short, it scans all your programs and determines if you can configure it to respect the xdg standards. It doesn't work for everything, but most applications do seem to have such an option.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#25I 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.
I've tried using tags, but the effort isn't worth it for me. Between search, occasional housekeeping, and a decent folder structure I have everything I need without being coupled to Apple.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#26This is so individual; his solution is not useful for me, and my solution won't be useful for anyone else. My home directory is nearly empty, because all the files I work with are in OwnCloud (so the real question is: what is the directory structure in OwnCloud). Local Git repositories are on a completely separate partition. Since KeepassXC now handles SSH keys, the keys from .ssh are now in the Keepass-file, which i…
I still put my .vimrc and .bashrc/.zshrc there.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#27Re: backups
I had an experience where I attempted to install a new Mac from a Time Machine backup and my Mac couldn't see anything on the Time Machine backup. Called Apple support and found out about a rare bug where the install process can sometimes initialize the Time Machine backup instead of installing from the backup.
Luckily I had backblaze set up but it took a loooong time to get a few hundred gig restored.
Now I have Time Machine, BackBlaze and iCloud backups. Every now and then I dump everything to a .tgz on S3
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#28I prefer to either LUKS-encrypt the volumes used by ZFS, or use ecryptfs at the user level. ZFS ‘encryption’ has some nasty gotchas, such as not encrypting snapshot names (which just boggles the mind …).
I add ~/tmp (cleaned out on every boot), and use ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to assign good lowercase names to everything.
And of course all code lives in ~/src.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#29I wish every OS had a space that is only and truly my space. No predefined directories, no config files that I did not put there myself, and no app should ever create files or directories there.
I settled a very long time ago to organize all my own data into projects under /proj and an alias `cdp` for `cd /proj`. That was what decades ago my colleagues were doing, and it has worked well for me ever since.
I appreciate the[1] home dir as a place for config files mostly and despise it for having become the system's junkyard otherwise.
[1] I'm hesitant to say 'my' because since everyone seems to put all their junk there, it does not feel like it is mine at all.
Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)
#30I bought the book "Building a Second Brain"[^1] by Tiago Forte and its recommended PARA methods is well-conceived, directly usable and tried and trusted for me. There is even a follow-up book from him about PARA only [^2]. I recommend to check it out (you'll also find many resources in the internet without the need to buy a book - although I highly recommend it and it would be an appreciation for the author) [^1]: ht…
I'm a big fan of PARA method, but I only use it in my note-taking app. I tried to apply it to filesystem, but it didn't work for me. So I went with his philosophy of keeping it simple and what works for you.