That's my point exactly. Most of these programs have command line flags you can pass to indicate the configuration file that should be used. Doing that, and the

That's my point exactly. Most of these programs have command line flags you can pass to indicate the configuration file that should be used. Doing that, and then by default putting my configuration in the most reasonable place for it--a dotfile-- is, in my opinion, the most respectful way a programmer can treat someone's machine. Not to mention that most of these are free and open source, so building according to convention is the best way to keep their userbase happy (as fiddlerwoaroof pointed out, $HOME was the original conventional dotfile location pre-2003.) So if your program doesn't respect my machine (meaning allow me to configure it to prevent unwanted behavior) then yes absolutely, into the bin with it. And rm -rf its dotfiles after.