Home directories.

[James Richard Tyrer]

Egbert van der Wal wrote:
> I think it would be a good idea to put all config-files in a separate 
> directory in the homefolder instead of just in the homefolder. ~/.etc 
> would make more sense than ~/.config because it's normal *nix practice 
> to use /etc for that kind of things. It always bothers me how full my 
> home directory is with all sorts of configs, even though they are 
> somewhat hidden by the dot at the start of the file/directorynames. A 
> bit catagorisation wouldn't be bad either, even if it was just a 
> separation between games(~/.etc/games/), apps(~/.etc/applications/) and 
> utilities(~/.etc/utilities/). It sure would clear things up a lot for me!

This idea seems to have some merit.  However, we currently have:

	$HOME/.config/menus
	$HOME/.local/share

for consistency, we should have either:

	$HOME/.local/etc/xdg/menus
	$HOME/.local/share

Or:

	$HOME/.etc/xdg/menus
	$HOME/.share

I have a lot of .<app> directories in my $HOME directory which could would
probably be correct as $HOME/.share/<app> or HOME/.local/share/<app>.  And there 
are a lot of ".*" files that could be moved to $HOME/.etc/ or $HOME/.local/etc/ 
-- some of them (e.g. X files) should probably have subdirectories.

However, you idea is based on everyone changing where they put their 
configuration files.  This is not going to happen immediately.

What I did was to make a new subdirectory of $HOME.  I have not come up with a 
good name for it and don't want to call it: "MyDocuments" for obvious reasons. 
I suggest the environment variable: "USR_HOME" for it so that is what I am 
calling if for now, but the name is not what is important if it can be 
referenced by an environment variable.  What is important is that I use this in 
place of $HOME for the base directory to store all user generated documents, 
images, pictures, etc..  This eliminates the problem with all of the clutter in 
$HOME because the files I use are in $USR_HOME.

--
JRT