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!
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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
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!
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.
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.
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
