Linux for Leftists @lemmygrad.ml mrshll1001 @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

How do you all organise your home directories?

I've just been getting up and running with a minimal distro lately and also discovered user-dirs.dirs, so I'm no longer bound by the standard auto-generated Home folders.

Looking to share and learn how other comrades organise their home directories. Any tips appreciated, and also just seeing how other people like to use and organise ~/ :-)

Here's how I've organised ~/ on my new install so far:

* audio/
    * audiobooks/
    * music/
    * podcasts/
* books/
* documents/
* dotfiles/
* downloads/
* images/
    * photos/
    * screenshots/
    * wallpaper/
* opt/
* planner/
* projects/
* scripts/
* videos/
* workspace/

… plus all the hidden cruft that's placed in home by various programs. I do my best to enforce the XDG_CONFIG_HOME standard but I'm still in the process of moving stuff into .config/.

Most of these are self-explanatory. opt/ is for software I build from source or otherwise not available in my package manager. planner/ is a git repo full of plain text and markdown files used to manage productivity and take notes. projects/ is my personal git repos containing stuff like my blog, creative writing etc. scripts/ is part of my $PATH and contains executable helper scripts such as setting a random wallpaper, fetching mail, etc. It's also a git repo. workspace/ is actually the XDG_DESKTOP_DIR but renamed. My window manager doesn't put files/folders on the actual desktop so I use this space for repos I contribute to for my job as well as transient tasks which require a folder structure for getting something done but which will likely be removed later. Basically stuff that's not an actual personal "project" and I'm working on at the moment.

Things I'm thinking about:

alternative names for downloads/. There are three folders which start do meaning tab-complete only works on the third letter. Not ideal. I've seen some people use incoming/ but I keep flip-flopping on whether I like this or not.
Possibly renaming dotfiles/ to .dotfiles/ but then, I use it a fair amount at the moment.
adding an articles folder for academic articles and HTML blog posts I want to keep locally.

4 comments

I only add a roms folder and my secondary drive mounted in my home folder. I like a simple and clean home folder with more complex folders the farther I go down a tree
I basically just use default. Or rather, I don't store almost anything in ~ except for .config and few local binaries. Almost everything else is organized on my home server. There I have everything I downloaded sorted in media/tv media/anime media/movies media/music. Where it is automatically put by Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr or in case of music downloaded from soulseek and then imported with beets. Then I just differentiate between work projects and personal projects. Plus some randomly created norg files for organization (I really have to create proper system for them).
For some reason, my brain just doesn't like having folders in my home directory that don't start with a capital letter.

My home directories look something like this:

. ├── Applications ├── Code │   ├── Scripts │   └── AUR ├── Desktop ├── Documents │   └── Nextcloud ├── Downloads ├── Music ├── Pictures │   └── Wallpapers ├── Videos └── Workspace

Applications stores appimages

Code contains the git repos of any projects I'm working on

Code/AUR contains my AUR packages

Desktop is pretty much unused, but it was created automatically so it's there

Documents/Nextcloud is the directory that's synced to my Nextcloud instance

Workspace is where I experiment with random stuff that usually doesn't last long. If it does, I move it to Code.

Everything else should be pretty self-explanatory.
- For some reason, my brain just doesn’t like having folders in my home directory that don’t start with a capital letter.
  
  That's fair. It never used to bother me at all but as I tend to do most stuff on the terminal these days I've wanted to keep everything more consistent. First the spaces bothered me, then the capitals :-P But having home folders with capitals feels like a nice exception as it is a relatively special folder.
  
  I like how clear Applications is. It's also cool how you've got the Nextcloud folder underneath Documents, very tidy.