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My .config Ship of Theseus

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Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#21

Post by wpm »

zenoprax wrote: post #8
tuckerman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides cleanliness which is more a preference I agree, separating config, data, and cache makes it easy to know what can/should be backed up, what can be synced across machines, etc.

I find that there is a tendency to make too many things hidden. I just assume I'll have to show hidden items by default in all contexts now.

As I said in a different comment here, I have 94 files and folders in my home, 84 of which are hidden, approximately zero of which actually needed to be hidden.

If anything, it's the reason this is such a common issue, the dot lets everyone shit files out all over the place but oh it's hidden so no big deal.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#22

Post by rewgs »

wpm wrote: post #20
froh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of that should live in .cache or .config and .local/share indeed if only people knew about, read (and followed) xdg... aka freedesktop.org

I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that. None of that shit should live in .local. I have a "local" already, it's called ~/Library. There's a Caches folder in there. Also a Preferences folder. At the very least why make local a dot-folder? Why add the extra keystroke? Local? Local to what?! Of course it's "local" it's my fuck…

> I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that.

XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#23

Post by froh »

wpm wrote: post #20
froh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of that should live in .cache or .config and .local/share indeed if only people knew about, read (and followed) xdg... aka freedesktop.org

I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that. None of that shit should live in .local. I have a "local" already, it's called ~/Library. There's a Caches folder in there. Also a Preferences folder. At the very least why make local a dot-folder? Why add the extra keystroke? Local? Local to what?! Of course it's "local" it's my fuck…

freedesktop.org standardizes unix, and it has ways to map .local, .cache, .config to os specifics.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#24

Post by dietr1ch »

Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #4

I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (…

I landed on a modular home-manager config that I can setup once and update in a single command.

It keeps my machines uniform enough without too much hassle.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#25

Post by tuckerman »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #15
nailer wrote: post #3

Never understood the point of having a dotfile for all of config when config is the point of dotfiles.

If all apps abode to it it would be nice because you could just backup config and skip all the other stuff. /app hierarchy is much better than /type because that allows for example of easily excluding ~/.cache from backups. ... but of course some apps must be super special flowers that need their own dir

Yeah, I find it especially annoying when apps do use the XDG directories but use them incorrectly (dumping a bunch of state/data in .config is unfortunately too common). If apps want to do that I wish they would just grab $HOME/.appname rather than mess up my .config dir.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#26

Post by jamesfinlayson »

Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #4

I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (…

Agreed. I had a workmate who stored all his dotfiles in git and checked them out on new computers.

With very few exceptions I just stick with the defaults and it works for me.

I also had other workmates who did everything in some exotic shell, so of course none of their one-liners worked in bash.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#27

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

threecheese wrote: post #5

And then you get friends like Claude - dozens of them - which prefer to crap all over $HOME. The app ‘Conductor’ does this, and I had to uninstall it; I just can’t crack my ‘ls ~/.co ’ habit, and “nd” is juuuuuust ahead of “nf”. It *used to* be ‘~/c ’ before .claude crapped itself into existence..

Stick all the stuff you manually care about into `~/home/` (or some other directory of your choice, e.g. `~/a/` for easy typing). Leave `~/` for the various programs to dump config files in.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#28

Post by wpm »

rewgs wrote: post #22
wpm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that. None of that shit should live in .local. I have a "local" already, it's called ~/Library. There's a Caches folder in there. Also a Preferences folder. At the very least why make local a dot-folder? Why add the extra keystroke? Local? Local to what?! Of course it's "local" it's my fuck…

> I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that. XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.

XDG stands for X Desktop Group. It absolutely does not stand for Cross Desktop Group and has nothing to do with macOS or Windows, outside of aforementioned X apps on Quartz via XQuartz which as far as I know is completely dead.

Re: My .config Ship of Theseus

#29

Post by froh »

wpm wrote: post #28
rewgs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that. XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.

XDG stands for X Desktop Group. It absolutely does not stand for Cross Desktop Group and has nothing to do with macOS or Windows, outside of aforementioned X apps on Quartz via XQuartz which as far as I know is completely dead.

the successor to xdg, freedesktop.org, however is acknowledging the need for cross platform openness. that's exactly why you indeed can configure where the three main "stores" of compliant applications, their config, their data and their caches.

you can point them to %APPDATA%..., ~/Library or the Linux defaults.

my point in this is: there are free and open conventions and we wouldn't need this "my HOME is cluttered" fuss, if technical teams would embrace them.

so why don't they respect XDG_ env vars for their config and data?

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