That’s what the article talks about. How applications should use $XDG_DATA_HOME, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_CACHE_HOME and some defaults if they’re not set.
Re:Dotfile madness
by themodelplumber on Saturday February 02, 2019 @04:03PM
(#19065695)
I'm not seeing it. Where does XDG define when and how an app should use:
/home/user/Documents/
/home/user/Downloads/
/home/user/Pictures/
/home/user/Videos/
Let me know what I'm missing.
Re:Dotfile madness
by nycticorax on Saturday February 02, 2019 @04:45PM
(#19065929)
I can't find "official" XDG documentation of this, but the Arch Wiki describes, for instance, the XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR and XDG_VIDEOS_DIR environment variables:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories
It looks like maybe the "official" documentation is here:
http://user-dirs.freedesktop.org/releases/xdg-user-dirs-0.17...
But I haven't gone through that carefully.
You should be able to change the default settings for these directories by changing /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults (system-wide) and ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (users override)
Why would it have to define those directories in particular?
There's no pleasing everybody.
I strongly prefer apps default to the previously used directory, and the home directory otherwise. IME apps are wrong 99% of the time when they guess their own save location.
But just dropping stuff in my home directory--look, if I'm in a hurry and my defenses are down, you basically just encouraged me to clutter things up.
The last software I found that does this is a "download helper"...even though I have a Downloads folder that my distro already set up, that Chrome and Firefox know to use, this download helper thinks I want those downloads dumped in my home folder. I hope some generous person changes this behavior, meanwhile I forgot to charge it manually for the last batch and I have a bunch of cleanup to do.