I want a clean config directory! :: rabbiticTranslator
rabbitictranslator.com
And it can be done easily, ackshually. But what is that all about? The problem It has been a longstanding complaint that the ~/.config/ directory on Linux systems can get riddled with configuration files. This is the case with KDE software as well. My idea is that we should be putting those into subdirectories inside ~/.config/. The Freedesktop XDG Base Directory specification generally only states that standard configuration files should go under XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.

There’s a proposal at the linked blog post for how to clean up the config directory.

The post goes into detail which changes would be required in KDE software using Qt.

After reading, I just have one question (the blog does not seem to have a comment section): how does this handle transitioning from the old location to the new location? Imagine having a katerc config file under ~/.config and one under ~/.config/kate (which is the suggestion from the post) - should those be merged once and then the old one gets deleted?

  • @zmej420blazeit
    1•1 year ago

    i haven’t looked too deeply into it, but a lot of kde config files already have some sort of update and version data. transitioning to new locations shouldn’t be TOO difficult. I think everyone can agree it should be done. I imagine that naming and specific locations could turn into bikeshedding though.

    It’s been tempting for me to use some LD_PRELOAD magic to clean things up. I’m the kind of person that keeps my home directory read-only and uses custom environment variables for particularly egregious applications.