Today, I would like to talk aboutXDG base directory specification

You can read the article, but the idea is a guidance for people creating and maintaining software programs.

What is all about ?

You should have noticed there are a lot of files starting with. in your home directory. Some are configuration files, some are cache, some are runtime data.

What is the problem ?

Well, it's a mess. Having all these files in your home folder is a bit strange, also not easy to follow if you have a dotfiles strategy.

Instead of having

~/.gitconfig~/.tmux.conf......

you could have

~/.config/git/config~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf...

This specification is progressively adopted, you will see a lot of files in ~/.config/ or ~/.cache folders. These two are the most commonly used by the programs.

So right now, a lot of programs started to support XDG base directory specifications, some made the choice to use directly the ~/.config to store config files, some simply argues they don't want to support them 🤦.

You can imaginethe amount of mess

What are the benefits of using XDG

• it's cleaner
• you have one folder per program
• you can add a README.md file in each folder to take notes or to share information when sharing dotfiles on GitHub.

How to start ?

You can do it manually, by reading every program man files... or ... you can use tools that will report you the things you can migrate.

Here are my favorites:

git clone https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninjacd xdg-ninja./xdg-ninja.sh

nix run github:b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

The first one is only about reporting current status about each dotfile. It also reports a status for files that are currently unsupported, or when developers declined to support XDG.

It provides you information on how to migrate them.

This one is very cool, because it will never simply make no change to your dotfiles.

yay -Sy antidot-bin

brew install doron-cohen/tap/antidot

This one is about listing them, it reports a bit less results.
But it can help you to migrate them automatically.