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 (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.
I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.
I usually treat an app putting stuff into $HOME with no reason to change that as a reason to not use the app. I've genuinely switched software multiple times because of the old one doing this.
I also suggest you try xdg-ninja, which automatically scans your home directory and shows which of those directories you can change to a different location:
On my Mac, there are 94 items in my home directory. 10 of them are expected, coming from either the user template or from single user installations of applications.
Two of the additions are not hidden: go and quicklisp. I don't actually mind this. Hidden folders are stupid if I am expected to be navigating into them either in the GUI or in the CLI. Slightly annoying since there's a perfectly good Library folder they could have dumped themselves in instead but whatever. At least I can see them without unhiding hidden files.
The rest? The other EIGHTY FUCKING TWO items in "my home"?? Hidden dot file BULLSHIT.
11 for Zsh related bullshit. Eleven! Are you fucking serious?
.wget-hsts? What the fuck is even that? Fuck off!
What absolute slop! What an incredibly stupid and shitty way to create caches and configurations. Braindead. I feel like im taking crazy pills. I'm gobsmacked that every time I look into "can I move this dogshit" I find a GitHub issue where the devs seem taken aback and confused "why would you want to do that". Eat shit! What do you mean the plaintext json files we put your config into and never built a GUI for should go into a folder you can see and navigate too easily? Whaaaat?? What do you mean "$XDG_CONFIG" exists? Hmmm no, checking for that would take 5 lines of code so no. Also, assholes, macOS doesn't canonically use goddamn XDG environment variables. Just because it uses a terminal you recognize doesn't mean it's fucking Linux! Take your .config and .cache and .local shite out of here.
And I've tried to fight it, but eventually you give up. It's a losing battle against tasteless patterns and asshole, careless developers. 150 something versions of Firefox and only recently could you move .mozilla. OpenSSH will never not pollute your home directory, they said so!
My desktop is now my home directory. It's mine. My terminal starts up there. Folders of stuff I actually give a fuck about go there. My browsers download into ~/Desktop/Downloads. I'm done fighting. My home was trashed. Crimes occurred. So I moved.
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 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 (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.
I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.
[0] https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux
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<TAB>’ habit, and “nd” is juuuuuust ahead of “nf”.
It *used to* be ‘~/c<TAB>’ before .claude crapped itself into existence..
I usually treat an app putting stuff into $HOME with no reason to change that as a reason to not use the app. I've genuinely switched software multiple times because of the old one doing this.
I also suggest you try xdg-ninja, which automatically scans your home directory and shows which of those directories you can change to a different location:
https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja
I have a big shell config file that sets proper locations for all sort of programs I use:
https://github.com/flexagoon/dotfiles/blob/main/dot_config/f...
I have given up on my home directory.
On my Mac, there are 94 items in my home directory. 10 of them are expected, coming from either the user template or from single user installations of applications.
Two of the additions are not hidden: go and quicklisp. I don't actually mind this. Hidden folders are stupid if I am expected to be navigating into them either in the GUI or in the CLI. Slightly annoying since there's a perfectly good Library folder they could have dumped themselves in instead but whatever. At least I can see them without unhiding hidden files.
The rest? The other EIGHTY FUCKING TWO items in "my home"?? Hidden dot file BULLSHIT.
11 for Zsh related bullshit. Eleven! Are you fucking serious?
.wget-hsts? What the fuck is even that? Fuck off!
What absolute slop! What an incredibly stupid and shitty way to create caches and configurations. Braindead. I feel like im taking crazy pills. I'm gobsmacked that every time I look into "can I move this dogshit" I find a GitHub issue where the devs seem taken aback and confused "why would you want to do that". Eat shit! What do you mean the plaintext json files we put your config into and never built a GUI for should go into a folder you can see and navigate too easily? Whaaaat?? What do you mean "$XDG_CONFIG" exists? Hmmm no, checking for that would take 5 lines of code so no. Also, assholes, macOS doesn't canonically use goddamn XDG environment variables. Just because it uses a terminal you recognize doesn't mean it's fucking Linux! Take your .config and .cache and .local shite out of here.
And I've tried to fight it, but eventually you give up. It's a losing battle against tasteless patterns and asshole, careless developers. 150 something versions of Firefox and only recently could you move .mozilla. OpenSSH will never not pollute your home directory, they said so!
My desktop is now my home directory. It's mine. My terminal starts up there. Folders of stuff I actually give a fuck about go there. My browsers download into ~/Desktop/Downloads. I'm done fighting. My home was trashed. Crimes occurred. So I moved.
God I fucking hate dotfiles.
I feel you. My solution is leaning into `z` ("frecency" heuristic), and selective use of "extra" zshrc aliases.
I’m moving slowly in the direction of Guix home for dotfile management, but until it covers all my bases, I’m fond of the gnu stow method
Same, but Nix Home Manager for me.
Separately from guix-the-distribution? Any chance your config in online somewhere?
Never understood the point of having a dotfile for all of config when config is the point of dotfiles.
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.