I’ve just been getting up and running with a minimal distro lately and also discovered user-dirs.dirs, so I’m no longer bound by the standard auto-generated Home folders.

Looking to share and learn how other comrades organise their home directories. Any tips appreciated, and also just seeing how other people like to use and organise ~/ :-)

Here’s how I’ve organised ~/ on my new install so far:

* audio/
    * audiobooks/
    * music/
    * podcasts/
* books/
* documents/
* dotfiles/
* downloads/
* images/
    * photos/
    * screenshots/
    * wallpaper/
* opt/
* planner/
* projects/
* scripts/
* videos/
* workspace/

… plus all the hidden cruft that’s placed in home by various programs. I do my best to enforce the XDG_CONFIG_HOME standard but I’m still in the process of moving stuff into .config/.

Most of these are self-explanatory. opt/ is for software I build from source or otherwise not available in my package manager. planner/ is a git repo full of plain text and markdown files used to manage productivity and take notes. projects/ is my personal git repos containing stuff like my blog, creative writing etc. scripts/ is part of my $PATH and contains executable helper scripts such as setting a random wallpaper, fetching mail, etc. It’s also a git repo. workspace/ is actually the XDG_DESKTOP_DIR but renamed. My window manager doesn’t put files/folders on the actual desktop so I use this space for repos I contribute to for my job as well as transient tasks which require a folder structure for getting something done but which will likely be removed later. Basically stuff that’s not an actual personal “project” and I’m working on at the moment.

Things I’m thinking about:

  • alternative names for downloads/. There are three folders which start do meaning tab-complete only works on the third letter. Not ideal. I’ve seen some people use incoming/ but I keep flip-flopping on whether I like this or not.
  • Possibly renaming dotfiles/ to .dotfiles/ but then, I use it a fair amount at the moment.
  • adding an articles folder for academic articles and HTML blog posts I want to keep locally.
  • @mrshll1001OP
    2•1 year ago

    Also if you delete or rename major default directors like “downloads” programs will create a new directory under the old name if they default to it.

    Thankfully none of the software I use does this. They either follow the XDG standard or let me set it manually before I downloaded anything (Firefox).

    If you really don’t want to type the third letter have one uppercase and one lowercase. That would be enough

    That’s fair.