Against Programs That Violate Your $HOME

I think of my home folder as a physical space. A room where I keep the stuff I care about. There is a class of programs that enter this room without knocking on the door and think that dumping their dirty laundry on my floor is perfectly fine.

Watching my space being polluted by applications that carelessly scatter their dotfiles and directories everywhere, when a well-known standard (XDG) and dedicated subfolders exist for exactly this purpose (.cache, .config, .local, and so on), feels like a violation of my personal space.

And even when an application provides an environment variable I can set to make it behave correctly, having to go hunting for it and then clutter my rc files with workarounds still feels disrespectful; a blatant lack of care for my time. In fact, it’s even worse: it tells me the developers knew it was the wrong thing to do, went as far as adding an option to fix it, but couldn’t be bothered to do the right thing by default.

Wall of Shame

Here is a list of programs and folders in my home directory that are squatting in it. Shame on them.

My Workaround

I have come to the conclusion that I need a “real” home. For a while I thought I could solve it technically: use an overlay filesystem over my home, run programs with different users… In the end I chose the low-tech version: a subdirectory (two, to be precise).

I now have ~/box, which is my True Home™, and ~/dl, where I dump downloads and temporary files that I want to survive a reboot. They were chosen following a couple of principles:

• Easy to remember.
• Short names, to avoid lengthening paths too much.
• Must start with different letters, for fast tab completion.

Conclusion

Every self-respecting blog post should have its call to action, so here’s mine:

If you’re a developer, please: respect your users’ $HOME.

You can show that you care and read the XDG Base Directory Specification, it’s short. My solution is not a perfect one; my home directory is still a mess of uninvited guests. But at least now I have a corner of it that is truly mine.