Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023) (unixdigest.com)

I remember I deleted a built-in directory like "Documents", and it lost its custom document icon, even when I created a "Documents" directory anew. No amount of googling / asking forums and IRC could bring my custom icon back. :)

(Linux Mint, Cinnamon)

Having come up with a light structure and kept it for 7 years now, mine is: media, life, edu, data, dev, pix

The most heavily structured is /edu, everything else is a shitshow but I generally know where to find stuff. There are a few others that are dead. I don't bother putting dotfiles into this, but I probably should. I try to minimize directories with the same first letter for faster tab completion.

I have two folders: "Development" where the git repos are, and "Downloads" where everything else.

I am really envious on the FreeBSD' filestructure of OS'. The simplicity is so obvious and I really like that you know what you have.

I bought the book "Building a Second Brain"[^1] by Tiago Forte and its recommended PARA methods is well-conceived, directly usable and tried and trusted for me. There is even a follow-up book from him about PARA only [^2]. I recommend to check it out (you'll also find many resources in the internet without the need to buy a book - although I highly recommend it and it would be an appreciation for the author)

[^1]: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/book

[^2]: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/para

This is so individual; his solution is not useful for me, and my solution won't be useful for anyone else.

My home directory is nearly empty, because all the files I work with are in OwnCloud (so the real question is: what is the directory structure in OwnCloud). Local Git repositories are on a completely separate partition.

Since KeepassXC now handles SSH keys, the keys from .ssh are now in the Keepass-file, which is on OwnCloud. That was a huge simplification, and now there is nothing in my home directory that I really care much about.

I have found it surprizingly difficult to categorize my files in a way that is elegant and intuitive. I've been meaning to look into FUSE for a tagging-based system instead of the current hierarchical one, although I suspect that the difficulty of categorizing things is unlikely to go away even with tags.

The “user-dirs.dir” setting is something I didn’t know was configurable. I thought I was always stuck with ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, …

Have slowly been using nixos as my primary driver (still in an emulated vm though). One thing I love here is the declarative nature. Lately have been experimenting with various desktop environments. I tried gnome and “it works” but have been fascinated with the idea of “ricing” my setup.

Currently using a Wayland compositor called hyprland to achieve something like this: https://github.com/outfoxxed/hy3?tab=readme-ov-file#demo

Community has experienced some drama though with fdo/x/wlroots. Always willing to make a change up if a better alt comes up though.

One major complaint I have with file systems is that too many directories start with the letter “D”.

Desktop, Dev, Downloads, Documents, Dropbox etc.

I thought about taking action about this, but as the author points about, many applications are quite opinionated on the matter.

> easily and quickly find what you're

Yes, that's why due to yet another totally unrelated quirk of history you

> have all the basic hidden stuff which ... such as .config

> but I only leave those dotfiles in place which work identically across the different systems I use

or you can use a better solution like chezmoi config manager and have templates to allow you to store changes even for those files while retaining the history of changes

But the most important piece of advice is missing: get an Everything-like utility (fsearch is a worse alternative on Linux) and bind it to an easy shortcut, that'd be very often the fastest way to find any file and not have to remember all those folder hierarchies (not that they aren't useful)

The only things in my home directory (note: I use Windows, but the convention still applies) are stuff that demand to be in there, like savegame files and software like Discord which demand to reside in %appdata% or else.

My stuff are found literally everywhere but, usually in their own drives and partitions.

just put everything on the desktop, then its all in one place.

    calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head
    .
    ├── 2022
    │   ├── 04
    │   │   ├── 19

https://git.ceux.org/today.git/about/

so i open my shell, it drops me into ~/t/, which is symlinked to ~/work/YYYY/DD/MM.

my GTK file picker is also setup to automatically give me the last 3 days on the bookmark bar.

Time is not the _best_ heuristic, but it's not bad.

screenshots from scrot all get dumped into ~/screenshots/ by date.

the only real 'folders' i keep around are ~/src/, ~/bin/ and ~/documents/, with the last being like, tax documents.

    calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head
    .
    ├── 2022
    │   ├── 04
    │   │   ├── 19

    calvin@bison:~/work$ tree -d | head
    .
    ├── 2022
    │   ├── 04
    │   │   ├── 19

?

To alleviate the issue with most applications dumping their files in your home directory, i found xdg-ninja[0] to be helpful.

In short, it scans all your programs and determines if you can configure it to respect the xdg standards. It doesn't work for everything, but most applications do seem to have such an option.

[0] https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

Re: backups

I had an experience where I attempted to install a new Mac from a Time Machine backup and my Mac couldn't see anything on the Time Machine backup. Called Apple support and found out about a rare bug where the install process can sometimes initialize the Time Machine backup instead of installing from the backup.

Luckily I had backblaze set up but it took a loooong time to get a few hundred gig restored.

Now I have Time Machine, BackBlaze and iCloud backups. Every now and then I dump everything to a .tgz on S3

I prefer to either LUKS-encrypt the volumes used by ZFS, or use ecryptfs at the user level. ZFS ‘encryption’ has some nasty gotchas, such as not encrypting snapshot names (which just boggles the mind …).

I add ~/tmp (cleaned out on every boot), and use ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to assign good lowercase names to everything.

And of course all code lives in ~/src.

I wish every OS had a space that is only and truly my space. No predefined directories, no config files that I did not put there myself, and no app should ever create files or directories there.

I settled a very long time ago to organize all my own data into projects under /proj and an alias `cdp` for `cd /proj`. That was what decades ago my colleagues were doing, and it has worked well for me ever since.

I appreciate the[1] home dir as a place for config files mostly and despise it for having become the system's junkyard otherwise.

[1] I'm hesitant to say 'my' because since everyone seems to put all their junk there, it does not feel like it is mine at all.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned homesick yet. I prefer homeshick[0], a Bash clone, so I can avoid installing Ruby.

[0] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick

I hate having a polluted home directory, especially when an application thinks it should get a non hidden directory in my home!

The one that upsets me the most is the default directory for go modules `~/go`. This frustrates me so much. I refused to install any go apps or use it for development for years. I've unfortunately had to give in, and it can at least be overridden by setting `GOPATH`, but it is a terrible, terrible default.

  "I actually like having visible directories, versus having to figure out where in /usr/share or /usr/local/ or ~/.local or /var an installer chose to sneak their files in."

  function userConfigDir() {
    switch (process.platform) {
      case 'darwin':
        return `${os.homedir()}/Library/Application Support`;
      case 'win32':
        if (process.env['APPDATA']) {
          return process.env['APPDATA'];
        } else {
          throw new Error('%APPDATA% is not set correctly');
        }
      case 'aix':
      case 'freebsd':
      case 'openbsd':
      case 'sunos':
      case 'linux':
        return process.env['XDG_CONFIG_HOME'] || `${os.homedir()}/.config`;
      default:
        throw new Error(`The platform ${process.platform} is currently unsupported.`);
    }
  }

    import "google.golang.org/grpc"

    replace example.com/foo/bar v2.35.0 => example.org/baz/bar/v2 master

Beyond organization, I want to concisely back up and port between machines.

The `.config` folder is a big headache when trying to be strategic about backups due to apps putting gigs of session data there.

"session data" is not "config", consarnit! An app's "config" shouldn't be gigs large. Grumble grumble, grouse grouse, and so on. :^)

I actually have quite a simple structure that serves me well (your mileage might vary)

  projects/
    2023/
    2024/
      0000-something/
      0312-other-project/
      0419-hn-comment/

each year I make a year folder. And each project has a month + day prefix. Sometimes I want long term projects to pop up on top, so I prefix them with 0000 (or only make the day 00).

It is simple, works on any OS. Although on Linux I do have some helper scripts. And it is very easy to quickly make a directory and move files from downloads into this directory. Keeping the nesting only one level deep helps for the discoverability. (versus the YYYY/MM/DD pattern which uses an extra month level)

  projects/           | 01.01.2017
    something/        | 01.01.2024
    other-project/    | 01.01.2023
    hn-comment/       | 01.01.2022

In case anyone is looking for inspiration, my macOS homedir contains:

  # multiple organizations under Projects:
  ~/Projects/GitHub-org-name/repo-name

  # temp files:
  ~/Scratch/0_jira
  ~/Scratch/1_temp
  ~/Scratch/2_builds
  ~/Scratch/9_archive

  # Emacs org-mode files
  ~/Org

  # Top-level screenshots
  ~/Screenshots

Using it with zoxide[1] allows me to run "z weba" and get taken to:

  ~/Projects/client_org/amazing-webapp

I also use a couple of helper functions in my zshrc while working in the Scratch directories:

  # Marky Mark and the Function Bunch
  function gcd {
    git clone $1 && cd "$(basename "$_" .git)"
  }

  function showpath {
    echo $PATH | sed -e $'s/:/\\\n/g'
  }

  if [[ $OSTYPE =~ ^darwin.* ]] then
    function brewup {
      brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup
    }
  fi

  function mc {
    command mkdir $1 && cd $1
  }

  function mcd {
    local TODAYDATE
    TODAYDATE=$(date +%F)
    command mkdir ${TODAYDATE} && cd ${TODAYDATE}
  }

  function mce {
    command mkdir ${EPOCHSECONDS} && cd ${EPOCHSECONDS}
  }

EPOCHSECONDS comes from the zsh/datetime module[2]

[1] https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

[2] https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Zsh-Modules.html#The-...

I think it's a nice idea, but don't like the media structure into family and so on. Looks like he's going to have a ton of problems with duplicates and then edited duplicates down the line, which can easily be mixed up, and then you lose your edits and so on.

Pictures are better sorted with EXIF keywords. So, metadata stored in the picture itself, perhaps even in the MIME type. Thus, if a picture is family related, just tag it #family, or #personx and so on. This is why I store them in the same folder on a per-date basis. The rest is keywords edited with programs such as Adobe Bridge and so on.

As for document file name structure, text files and the like, I've used both `Date then Descrpition.txt` or `Keyword Title or Description and then Date.txt` with the date obviously being an ISO date such that `YYYY-MM-DD-hhmm` with `-hhmm` being optional, also for sorting reasons. Sometimes I like sorting on "topics" i.e. keywords or titles, but other times, such as in logs, I like the date first because it's more essential to know when you logged something, and not necessarily the topic.

You should think the date is superfluous since it's also stored in the system. However, my experience that when you move around a file, the date eventually changes, and certainly if you make a mistake along the way. Meanwhile a filename date doesn't change. Also it helps with list sorting where applicable.

For me the way I use is as follows:

Capital names for GUI things, lowercase names for CLI things. I'd prefer ~/documents, etc, but GUI people insist on capitalizing, so whatever. Very rarely I have to mix those, so it's not a big problem.

~/dotfiles is my dotfiles directory with git. I create ~/.zshrc -> dotfiles/zshrc, etc. I don't use any software to manage that, I just create symlinks. In the past I've used ~/.dotfiles but I think that making it visible makes more sense.

~/projects is my projects directory. ~/projects/test is throwaway test projects to check things out, etc. ~/projects/my is my personal projects. ~/projects/company is projects for company I'm working for. I'm kind of freelancer and sometimes work for different companies, so separation is necessary.

~/tmp is my throwaway directory for everything. I have shell function mkcdtmp which creates ~/tmp/240419 (current date) and cds into it. It's a wonderful way. I rarely clean it, because I prefer to buy big discs and keep trash around, somewhat organized. If I need something from yesterday or past month, I know where to find it. That's the most important thing I did for organizing my temp work which is plenty. Of course I can create ~/tmp/whatever if needed, it's all trash stuff.

Well, that's all, I guess. I don't use ~/Desktop. I rarely use ~/Documents, still need to find a way to organize it. Also I dump my short notes and stuff to my github repo which builds a personal website. I tried various notes software but ordinary website with markdown turned out the best way for me.

I never was able to organize my work in a very structured way, it's always piles of trash moving around which eventually turn into something usable, so instead of fighting myself I decided to make that trash organized.

Essentially my computer is disposable. Everything in ~/projects is in git. Everything in ~/tmp is not very important and more like a cache or discarded work. I'm trying to organize things in a way so restoring it from the clean state wouldn't take much time. I often reinstall OS from the scratch and I often switch between operating systems and laptops, that suits me best.

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