Put your $HOME in .home!

Shapeshifter · 2009-08-08 19:07:08

Well, just a little something I've been doing for half a year now, which I find very smart. >.>

my $HOME is in /home/shapeshifter/.home

That means that all the apps will put their dotfiles in the .home folder, instead of trashing my "real" home folder. I have all the folders I like in /home/shapeshifter, like docs and images and whatever, but the configs and dots go all in .home. Brilliant I think!

To do this you just tell adduser or whatever user creation method you use to use .home as the home folder instead of the default one. Also, put this in your .bashrc:

cd /home/username

So now when you open a terminal, you don't end up in that uninteresting $HOME of yours but in the tidy place. unless you're a tilde (~) user, which I am not, everything will work as ever. Scripts will not be disturbed by this as non-interactive bash sessions don't read .bashrc.

Simple, and very tidy. Only problem: Some gui apps, like e.g. the gtk dialogs will open up .home as default thinking that it is the folder of interest. I pretty much suspect that there's a way of telling them to use the actual home folder as a start instead of .home, but I really don't care yet, and I've been doing this for a while.

So, this is just a little tip some people may have not thought of, and it really makes your home folder a lot tidier!

Last edited by Shapeshifter (2009-08-09 21:30:13)

Pyntux · 2009-08-08 19:48:36

Or you can even tell your user to use home folder for example on other partition, like me. My home dir with config files is on /files/home, but my /home is just home for data!

Wintervenom · 2009-08-08 19:55:19

Or more developers could begin making their applications write configuration in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, where it should really go.

Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-08-08 19:56:10)

XFire · 2009-08-08 20:01:50

Wintervenom wrote:

Or more developers could begin making their applications write configuration in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, where it should really go.

I like ^^ way more.

moljac024 · 2009-08-08 20:22:30

Or you can have a relatively small /home partition for configs and have a data partition which you mount at /mnt/data
That's the way I do it...

Shapeshifter · 2009-08-08 20:23:29

Wintervenom wrote:

Or more developers could begin making their applications write configuration in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, where it should really go.

I agree 100%. Unfortunately, this is not reality. Until then, the "fix" I use, works ^^

pauldonnelly · 2009-08-08 21:30:41

That's a good idea.

It seems like it would not be hard to patch every program, although it's probably beyond Arch's purview.

Gen2ly · 2009-08-08 23:35:30

Good thinking. In KDE I know you can tell Dolphin to use anything as home directory. Been thinking about this awhile why linux doesn't just create a config directory.

pauldonnelly · 2009-08-09 06:17:20

Gen2ly wrote:

Good thinking. In KDE I know you can tell Dolphin to use anything as home directory. Been thinking about this awhile why linux doesn't just create a config directory.

It has one. The question is why so many programs ignore it.

xd-0 · 2009-08-09 07:10:46

Wintervenom, could'nt agree more! Have very often got irritated about applications storing data in the "wrong" places. Perhaps it's time to start sending in some bug reports

Barrucadu · 2009-08-09 08:13:12

Hmm, I might set $HOME to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME…

SpeedVin · 2009-08-09 13:27:25

Barrucadu wrote:

Hmm, I might set $HOME to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME…

I think I will to the same but how do that apps will save their config files in $HOME/.config?

Last edited by SpeedVin (2009-08-09 13:27:47)

Barrucadu · 2009-08-09 14:49:16

SpeedVin wrote:

Barrucadu wrote:
Hmm, I might set $HOME to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME…
I think I will to the same but how do that apps will save their config files in $HOME/.config?

If I keep $XDG_CONFIG_HOME set to /home/barrucadu/.config compliant apps should still work.

Procyon · 2009-08-09 14:56:59

If you set XDG_CONFIG_HOME and HOME to the same, won't you have both directories with and without dots? That can't look good.

SpeedVin · 2009-08-09 15:11:25

Barrucadu wrote:

SpeedVin wrote:
Barrucadu wrote:
Hmm, I might set $HOME to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME…
I think I will to the same but how do that apps will save their config files in $HOME/.config?
If I keep $XDG_CONFIG_HOME set to /home/barrucadu/.config compliant apps should still work.

Where can I set this globally or I have to configure manually all my apps to store config files in $HOME/.config ?

Acecero · 2009-08-09 16:37:19

This sounds more complicated then it needs to be, there should be a standard that tells what devs to do with the dot config files in the first place.

Barrucadu · 2009-08-09 18:10:21

Acecero wrote:

This sounds more complicated then it needs to be, there should be a standard that tells what devs to do with the dot config files in the first place.

There is. Unfortunately, people don't follow it. User specific files should be stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, if unset, ~/.config should be used.

andre.ramaciotti · 2009-08-09 18:18:16

Some people don't follow it, some projects are dead and won't change it... I've found some projects that don't even put a dot in front of the folder name.

I've been using the same solution from the creator of this topic.

Baraclese · 2009-08-09 19:29:11

I've never heard about $XDG_CONFIG_HOME before but it makes so much sense, I've always been annoyed by the clutter of .* in my home directory.

graysky · 2009-08-09 21:20:02

Interesting... I haven't messed with environment variables before. How can one change $HOME to this paradigm of /home/USER/.home without roaching things?

Barrucadu · 2009-08-09 21:23:53

Try setting it in your ~/.bashrc (or whatever). I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if that works.

Shapeshifter · 2009-08-09 21:26:28

graysky wrote:

How can one change $HOME to this paradigm of /home/USER/.home without roaching things?

If you're not setting the user up from scratch, you can simply edit /etc/passwd where you'll find a line like:

shapeshifter:x:1000:100:,,,:/home/shapeshifter/.home:/bin/zsh

Change the path in the middle to your desired directory, and then move all your configs to it right after, or you'll make a mess of things. Or you can play safe and instead of editing a file you can do

usermod -d your-new-desired-home-path

and again move the configs.

Shapeshifter · 2009-08-09 21:29:33

Ohhhh, most important bit about the whole deal I forgot to mention in the first post (added it now):

Put this in your .bashrc:

cd /home/username

So now when you open a terminal, you don't end up in that uninteresting $HOME of yours but in the tidy place. unless you're a tilde (~) user, which I am not, everything will work as ever. Scripts will not be disturbed by this as non-interactive bash sessions don't read .bashrc.

SpeedVin · 2009-08-10 08:29:54

Shapeshifter wrote:

graysky wrote:
How can one change $HOME to this paradigm of /home/USER/.home without roaching things?
If you're not setting the user up from scratch, you can simply edit /etc/passwd where you'll find a line like:
shapeshifter:x:1000:100:,,,:/home/shapeshifter/.home:/bin/zsh
Change the path in the middle to your desired directory, and then move all your configs to it right after, or you'll make a mess of things. Or you can play safe and instead of editing a file you can do
usermod -d your-new-desired-home-path
and again move the configs.

Ohh thanks that work's I got clean home directory
I got one question about bash.
Bash use config's from /home/user or /home/user/.home can I delate them form my /home/user?

Last edited by SpeedVin (2009-08-10 08:37:51)

scj · 2009-08-10 09:39:32

Or you could try something like libetc

Arch Linux

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Put your $HOME in .home!

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