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.

Update on 2024-07-26: you can also use xdg-ninja for the initial setup, but many things of the post still apply.

TLDR

• 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"

List

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

Partially/Fully Supported

• Bash
• Calcurse
• Cargo (CARGO_HOME means config + data, silly idea)
• Git
• GnuPG
• Lean (same as Cargo)
• Newsboat
• nim, nimble
• notmuch
• npm
• nuget
• Ollama (just models, config & ssh key are not supported)
• R
• wget
• xsel

Hardcoded

Many softwares live long enough to arrogantly ignore XDG Base Directory Specification and get away with it.

Exempli gratia, Firefox has a bug report regarding Support for the XDG Base Directory Specification which only got fixed in Firefox 147, 21 years later.

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

• ADB & Android Studio (would look for ADB_VENDOR_KEYS as well, but ~/.android would ALWAYS get generated…)
• Chromium (fixed in 146)
  • endless CEF/Electron/QtWebEngine projects…
• Firefox (fixed in 147 and ESR 153)
  • thus Thunderbird and Zotero
• MAME
• .NET (old solution and runtime discussion)
• Python (PYTHON_HISTORY works for Python 3.13+)
• Ren’Py (RENPY_PATH_TO_SAVES works on Ren’Py 7.5+ games)
• Vim (fully supported since 9.2.0019. Simply add source $VIMRUNTIME/xdg.vim in your vimrc.)
• VSCode and VSCodium (--extensions-dir is not enough as .vscode-oss/argv.json is still needed)
• w3m
• Zsh (via $ZDOTDIR)

Workaround

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 :

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

1. 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
   

2. Create "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/python/pythonrc:

   import readline
   readline.write_history_file = lambda *args: None
   

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

R

While R is configurable, my setup makes it a bit hard to follow XDG base dir spec:

• R is installed via mise-r, aka. asdf-r, and located in a weird place

$ which R
~/.local/share/mise/shims/R

• I use arf as R console, which is installed via mise GitHub backend
• I have custom libPaths to avoid unnecessary reinstall between minor/patch version updates.
• Makevars set to cache/speedup library compilation

arf

R 4.6.1> R.home()
[1] "~/.local/share/mise/installs/r/4.6.1/lib64/R"

R 4.6.1> .libPaths()
[1] "~/.local/share/R/library"
[2] "~/.local/share/mise/installs/r/4.6.1/lib64/R/library"

R 4.6.1> tools::makevars_user()
[1] "~/.config/R/Makevars"

Of course, it’s still possible and quite easy.

.profile (you can also set in shell rc):

# R
# https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-exts.html#Package-subdirectories
export R_PROFILE_USER="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/R/profile"
export R_MAKEVARS_USER="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/R/Makevars"
export R_HISTFILE="$XDG_STATE_HOME/R/history"

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/R/profile:

.libPaths(c("~/.local/share/R/library", .libPaths()))

The only annoyance is I can’t simply set R_HOME_USER due to .libPaths() located in another place. Anyway, at least it works better than outdated r-base package in many distros.

Show-off

$ ls -a1
.bashrc
.cache/
.config/
.gitignore
.local/
.profile
.ssh/
.zshenv
downloads/
music -> my-music-dir
projects/

It’s possible to move symlinks and things like .bashrc elsewhere as well. If done properly, $HOME could become:

$ ls -1
projects/

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

OCD Gospel!