Cleaning up the whole $HOME/<.pkgname>/ situation for individual app settings
3 years ago by promitheas to c/linux
Hey guys! Is there a way for me to force apps to treat e.g. $HOME/.config/ as their default directory to look for settings? I want to clear up my home directory because its getting quite messy and I don't even have that many packages installed yet.
Also, any way that would be easy and efficient for use with git for the purpose of backing up my dotfiles.
Thanks!
I've seen this too, but as someone who's submitted patches to 5+ projects to fix the pathing, not once has it been rejected
Thank you for your service o7
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME not every application respects it, but a lot do
No. Some applications won't change even if you'd make the PR for them, simply because they don't want to change legacy features.
For instance, the bash maintainers have refused to put .bashrc into .config/ and to even allow the option to move it.
xdg ninja can help move some stuff out of your home dir tho
There this program call xdg-ninja which tells you how to change the settings of various packages that live in $HOME.
Is not a perfect though because you'll have to do all changes manually but its the best I can think about. Hope its helps!
From my experience there's no simple way to do it. It's something you'll have to handle on a per-app basis as there's no standard that is followed universally. Here's a website with links to resources on various methods people use.
Might be worth looking into immutable distros (nix, guix) and their home management systems, or containerised apps (flatpak, where you can inject config). A lot of tools are hardcoded to non standard locations so it's kind of a losing battle by default. A similar strategy would be to use permissions or mount certain folders as read only.
One option might be to run certain of your apps in Docker. There are ways to go about running even graphical apps in Docker. And with Docker, you can tell it to mount /home//.config/someapp on the host to /home//.someapp in the container.
This is the right way to solve the issue, because this is actually a security issue, and I think most people don't realize that.
I'm aiming to make this easier, so everybody can benefit from this approach. I haven't publicly announced it yet because I'm still missing better documentation. But it's pretty advanced already, and I could use feedback on how it performs on your use-cases: https://codeberg.org/contr/contr
What ended up happening with me was I just have all my stuff in a separate /stuff partition. That way I don't need to worry about dotfiles cluttering up my actual data. I also use NixOS Home-Manager to manage my dotfiles for things like git and vscodium.
I'm a recent transplant from windows to linux and I saw this coming. My Documents is not reserved for documents that are actually mine, I had no expectation /home would be any different, and it seems I was correct. Other than some things I want quick access to (downloads, notes, scripts) I keep everything I care about organized under /data.
Not an immediate, but longterm solution: ask app developers to respect $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG Base Directory Specification in general.
And spread the knowledge about the spec, awareness of it helps.
I decided to go with chezmoi because of its simplicity and multi-machine design from the get-go. It seems the best option for me atm
the existing comments point out excellent solutions, but no one has mentioned boxxy (https://github.com/queer/boxxy) yet
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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@lemmy.ml
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/..., the situation is crap tbh and alot of devs refuse to even give you the option of switching to XDG standards for some reason. I started using flatpaks for most of my programs just to escape this.
I do know XDG standards are messy for devs to implement but at least have everything in .config or .local instead of spewing it across my home folder
save