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Are there more important things to solve? Of course. However, this particular topic on this particular message board is about dotfiles and the alternatives. D
by rswail 4y ago
Are there more important things to solve? Of course.
However, this particular topic on this particular message board is about dotfiles and the alternatives.
Dotfiles are a clumsy mechanism that came from the early days of Unix.
There are better alternatives that provide the same lack of "unknown/unnecessary" directories and files in the user's home directory/folder.
Each of Windows/MacOS/XDG-compliant OSs has the equivalent of:
1. A configuration directory
2. A storage directory that is maintained between user logins and/or application execution
3. A temporary/cache directory that is not guaranteed to be maintained between user logins or application execution.
The different languages/runtimes also have ways of retrieving these locations which are cross-platform but return the correct values and should be used by all applications that are written to modern standards.
- wruza 4y agoThis sounds like “let’s design something nobody ever will use”. Compare how often you (or anyone) created, edited, deleted or backed up a ~/.dotfile vs some file who-tf-knows-where in AppData or Library mazes. These have near zero discoverability and expect-ability. There are better alternatives Let’s define “better” first.