All programs should tell you where they store config files

wet_lettuce@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 757 points –
utcc.utoronto.ca

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.

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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.

.android
.cargo
.choosenim
.conda
.emacs.d
.nimble
.npm
.rustup

Run ls -al | wc -l to see the mess. If you can get it below 25, you have a clean setup.

Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.

Microsoft did for a while. 😜

There are so many places that games decide to put their save files on Windows.

I've got save directories in:

  • %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\Saved Games (only Elite Dangerous)
  • Documents (Mass Effect Andromeda, X4: Foundations, EVE Online, GreedFall, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, SteamVR)
  • Documents\My Games
  • %APPDATA%
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%
  • %APPDATA%..\LocalLow (does not seem to have an environment variable defined for this one)
  • Various game install directories

There's probably other places. Not sure how much the registry is used for saves, either, but that would complicate backups more than they already are.

I'd love if they just unify save and config data for games to %APPDATA%. Documents should never be touched by software without the user's explicit consent, though, and because of the situation, the Documents directory is the last place I ever put actual documents.

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