Linux @lemmy.ml promitheas @iusearchlinux.fyi 1y ago

Cleaning up the whole $HOME/<.pkgname>/ situation for individual app settings

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!

31 comments

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory#Support, 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
- I've seen developers complain that xdg is not a true standard and it only works on linux, which at that point I wanna start slapping people around.
  
  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
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME not every application respects it, but a lot do
- Only valid answer.
  
  No because Op's question is, what about those who do not confine to xdg config home?
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
- "For instance, the bash maintainers have refused to put .bashrc into .config"
  
  it's forkin' time
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.
- Yeah, Nix(OS) with Home-Manager is great for managing dotfiles. Impermanence is also nice but a bit more complicated.
- Adding VanillaOS as well, saw it a few days ago and it seems like a pretty decent immutable distro too.
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/<username>/.config/someapp on the host to /home/<username>/.someapp in the container.
- I run as much as I can in Docker for this reason among others.
- 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
  
  cc @[email protected]
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.
You can specify that in most setups, I’d reinstall and try that. Backing up your .config to git is super easy.
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.
Xdg-ninja that was mentioned by other people is probably the best for the main issue.
For the git stuff, look into bare git repos. Iirc distrotube has a good video explaining the concept
- 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
This tool can help you with certain programs that requires some extra steps to use .config/

31 comments