- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
This is the big thing I miss from my “pre-Unix” Mac days. In OS9 and earlier, apps were self contained, and didn’t spread their garbage everywhere. You deleted an app, you deleted all the app. Granted, there was a tradeoff (the parade of conflicting control panels and extensions you had to manually diagnose when your machine went sideways) but I never understood why in the Windows and Linux worlds devs would code so sloppily. Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.
Still salty after all these years
I use linux and this annoys me to, every program just spams my home directory with config files, even though .config and .cache exist and are the standard
Programming tools/IDEs seem especially egregious.
Set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path> in your environment and most tools follow it
I have, unfortunatly a lot of programs dont.
Right, forgot. And the specific workaround.
Run
ls -al | wc -lto see the mess. If you can get it below 25, you have a clean setup.deleted by creator
Microsoft did for a while. 😜