not keeping home directory tidy

formerly interested in ridding $HOME (~) of clutter but since gave up. the idea being that a carefully maintained primary dirctory would pay off when i script around it, unison sync them between other systems, etc. but under linux the home directory can quickly becomes cluttered, and there's no way to effectively control the paths of hundreds of disjoint software projects.

"who cares about optimizing your ls output"

the problem

many programs create dot (hidden) files directly under $HOME/ which can quickly become cluttered.

this explains: dotfile madness.

possible solutions

a good overview of solutions: standards: defending $HOME".

1. symlink them elsewhere. it will still appear as cluttered but the data can then be better organized.
2. set the environmental variables some programs have to control where their files are stored.
3. make $HOME read-only: chmod -222 $HOME.
4. get libetc working?

libetc

What is libetc ?

On my system I had way too much dotfiles: [...]

For easier maintenance I wrote libetc. It is a LD_PRELOAD-able shared library that intercepts file operations: if a program tries to open a dotfile in $HOME, it is redirected to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (as defined by freedesktop).

You can then store all your config files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME instead of using zillions dotfiles in $HOME

probably a bad idea, and it's out of date. some discussion.