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Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

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Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#31

Post by tetha »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #22

calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head . ├── 2022 │ ├── 04 │ │ ├── 19 https://git.ceux.org/today.git/about/ 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 'fo…

I have something similar with ~/Stuff. ~/Stuff contains a folder per month, and ~/CurrentStuff links to the current folder. From there I have a simple shell-function `mkstuff` to create a folder ~/CurrentStuff/$DAY-"$1".

Naturally, it's a huge mess, but it helps if a colleague is like "Hey, didn't we have an issue back in August with the XYZ?". `ls ~/Stuff/2023-{07,08,09}` tends to find things again.

Besides that, I mostly have Projects/ (git projects I change) and Repos/ (git projects I look at) on my work laptop.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#33

Post by lifefeed »

polivier wrote: post #10

I 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 always like the idea of tags, but whenever I get into a proper tagging system with thousands of entries I always end up having to regularly "refactor" my tags, which is fun exactly once and then it's just another goddamn chore.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#34

Post by mistersquid »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #22

calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head . ├── 2022 │ ├── 04 │ │ ├── 19 https://git.ceux.org/today.git/about/ 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 'fo…

    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

Please confirm you are not a monster and that you meant /YYYY/MM/DD.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#35

Post by l72 »

I hate having a polluted home directory, especially when an application thinks it should get a non hidden directory in my home!

The one that upsets me the most is the default directory for go modules `~/go`. This frustrates me so much. I refused to install any go apps or use it for development for years. I've unfortunately had to give in, and it can at least be overridden by setting `GOPATH`, but it is a terrible, terrible default.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#36

Post by mingus88 »

bradley13 wrote: post #9

This 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…

The only thing that matters to me is portability when I switch systems, and aware of work vs personal environments

I need to be able to login and run a single command to sync to have the appropriate set of files for whatever /linux/work/personal/desktop/server I am on

For example, I never want certain environment variables to be exported to work systems, like my home vault endpoint or certain tokens.

I recently switched to home-manager from the NixOS project and it looks very promising. The Nix language is complicated but the abstraction to define all these different types of environments is exactly what I need, and git branches manage the work/personal split of file content

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#37

Post by olau »

polivier wrote: post #10

I 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 underlying problem is that the way your brain works doesn't really map well into categories. Text searching sometimes works, but has the same problem.

Source: Nearly two decades ago we worked on this problem and read a bunch of research. We ended up making an app that let you input multiple facets to narrow things down, with the basic view being a calendar: https://nemo-docs.com/

We didn't have anyone marketing it, so it never really took off. The original plan was to build a serverless/P2P storage system underneath so sharing would be seamless and not require messing with servers, but never got that far.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#38

Post by nutrie »

olau wrote: post #37
polivier wrote: post #10

I 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 underlying problem is that the way your brain works doesn't really map well into categories. Text searching sometimes works, but has the same problem. Source: Nearly two decades ago we worked on this problem and read a bunch of research. We ended up making an app that let you input multiple facets to narrow things down, with the basic view being a calendar: https://nemo-docs.com/ We didn't have anyone marketing i…

I really like the idea behind this. That's what the Recent view should look like.

Re: Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

#39

Post by mingus88 »

weinzierl wrote: post #29

I 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 appreciat…

/data has been that area for me. It has been common practice since the late 90s to separate OS and data on completely different devices even

The homedirs belong on the OS drives and are managed by the OS. Anything you want to keep safe goes on the data volume where backups run.

It’s also very nice to just disconnect the data drives before any upgrades. You can’t corrupt a filesystem that isn’t even present to the system

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