Keep $HOME Clean via XDG Base Directory

Foreword

I came across Dotfile madness (2019) on Hacker News today, and found How I Keep My Home Directory Clean & XDG Base Directory on Arch Wiki.

This serves as a reminder of how to make $HOME (mostly) clutter-free, thus making Manage Dotfiles Using Bare Git Repo easier.

XDG Base Directory

For TLDR, see Use the XDG Base Directory Specification!
For specs, see XDG Base Directory Specification

Show, don’t tell:

# Use the XDG Base Directory Specification
# TLDR: https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com/
# Spec: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config"
export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share"
export XDG_STATE_HOME="$HOME/.local/state"
export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache"

Sterilization

Most are available in XDG Base Directory on Arch Wiki already.

Partially/Fully Supported

Bash
Calcurse
Git
GnuPG
Less
Newsboat
notmuch
npm & pnpm
nuget
nvm
rlwrap (.*_history: bash, ssh, trans, zsh)
translate-shell
wget
xsel
radian
R (conflicts w/ radian, TBA)
Ollama (just models, config & ssh key are not supported)

Hardcoded

Many softwares are old enough to arrogantly ignore XDG Base Directory Specification and get away with it. Exempli gratia, Firefox has a 20-year-old bug report regarding Support for the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification , and it’s updated just a few weeks ago as of ~~writing~~updating!

The list contains only a small fraction of blessed packages that might show some respect to the spec soon™️.

Firefox (thus Thunderbird and Zotero )
Chromium (even though NSS supports it already…)
itch
~~Mono~~
oh-my-tmux
Python
TigerVNC
Vim (relevant RFC)
VSCodium (--extensions-dir is not enough for me, and .vscode-oss/argv.json is still needed)
- Continue
- vscode-R
w3m
Zsh (via $ZDOTDIR)
ohmyzsh
powerlevel10k
.NET (old solution and runtime discussion)
ADB & Android Studio (would look for ADB_VENDOR_KEYS as well, but ~/.android would ALWAYS get generated…)
Ren’Py (RENPY_PATH_TO_SAVES works on Ren’Py 7.5+ games)

Sanitizer

Python

Common methods to disable Python history are pretty hacky:

I don’t like chown or chattr solution as .python_history is still present.
Removing ~/.python_history by creating ~/.pythonrc is just funny.

Quoted from a comment regarding this solution :

So I get to replace one turd in my home directory with another

I combine the answers of How can I disable the new history feature in Python 3.4? and enhance it by doing the following:

Add these in $HOME/.profile(.bashrc or .zshrc works too):

export PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX="$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/python
export PYTHONUSERBASE="$XDG_DATA_HOME"/python
export PYTHONSTARTUP="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/python/pythonrc

Create "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/python/pythonrc:

import readline
readline.write_history_file = lambda *args: None

Source $HOME/.profile by exec zsh, done.

Vim

Follow the instruction on Arch Wiki, and move the original files respectively:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vim
├── colors
└── vimrc

$XDG_DATA_HOME/vim
└── spell
    ├── en.utf-8.add
    └── ...

Show-off

$ ls -a1
.bashrc
.cache/
.config/
.dotfiles/
.gitignore
.local/
.profile
.ssh/
.tmux.conf -> .config/tmux/oh-my-tmux/.tmux.conf
.tmux.conf.local -> .config/tmux/tmux.conf.local*
.zshenv
downloads/
music -> my-music-dir
projects/
scripts -> my-script-dir

It’s possible to move .bashrc, .dotfiles, .tmux* and those symlinks elsewhere as well. I just don’t bother to do it. If done properly, $HOME could become:

$ ls -1
projects/

$ ls -a1
.cache/
.config/
.local/
.profile
.ssh/
projects/

OCD Gospel!