I’m looking to restructure my home folder. Have for a long time used the standard XDG user directory structure ($HOME/{Desktop,Documents,Downloads...}) and it has become a mess. Also the capitalized directory names are inconvenient for a multitude of reasons.

I’ll have to set the XDG user variables accordingly.

Anyone gone through a process of reorganizing their home directory structure beyond the standard XDG user directory structure. Did you note any oddities refraining from mentioned standards?

Here’s my initial idea:

$HOME
├── desktop
├── documents
│   ├── public
│   └── templates
├── downloads
├── media
│   ├── audio
│   │   ├── bleeps
│   │   └── music
│   ├── e-books
│   ├── graphics
│   │   ├── 3d
│   │   ├── raster
│   │   │   ├── palettes
│   │   │   └── wallpapers
│   │   ├── screenshots
│   │   └── vector
│   ├── photos
│   └── videos
├── sites
└── software
    ├── bin
    ├── games
    │   └── roms
    └── git
  • @kevincox
    3•3 years ago

    I basically don’t like apps messing in my folders anyways so I don’t worry about it too much. I leave the defaults but the only XDG defined folder I really use is Downloads but I basically use that folder for any temporary data.

    Other than that I will symlink the configs of certain apps that I care about (git, zsh, vim, …) into a good place for me and I keep most of my work in ~/p which is basically a directory of git repos.

    So basically I find the XDG stuff mostly useless so I keep the stuff I care about out of those folders.

    (Although I do wish more apps respected XDG_CONFIG_DIR rather than dumping crap into my home directory. )