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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

...if you actually know where to look in the first place though...

In my experience, print -l /etc/**/*foo* or grep -Ir foo /etc leads to results faster than stabbing in the dark of regedit search. Manpages usually list configuration files.

In /etc/$toolname

While in the registry it's like 5 layers deep and you need to figure out the vendor name along the way.

No, it's not there, it's in ~/.local. Or maybe ~/.cache. What is in /etc, however, is /etc/papersize. Not entirely sure who uses that, but it's there.

Also, regedit supports Ctrl+F.

Except that it is not /etc/$toolname.

Sometimes it's /etc/$subdirectory/$toolname, doing that very many-layers-deep thing that you describe.

Sometimes, particularly on the BSDs, it's /usr/local/etc.

Sometimes it's ~/.config/$subdirectory/$subdirectory/$thing . Or, if you are lucky, it follows the XDG rules for locating the ~/.config part.

Sometimes it's ~/.$toolname .

The irony is that all of the arguments about where the files are fall apart and miss the point, as the Windows registry hive file system is far more standardized than Linux-based operating systems and the BSDs are.

The real discussion point is whether a structured hierarchical database of key-value pairs with typed values, accessed through an operating system API, is better as an actual database file format, with all that that implies for things like indexing and the elimination of quoting rules, text parsing, and escaping; or as text files just like it used to be with the old loads-of-.INI files system of DOS-Windows 3.

The galaxy brain solution is to use nixos/home manager and design your own arbitrary layout config hydra.

You forgot about if the tool was installed using snap, then it is someplace different yet again!

I didn't want to spend a whole afternoon eumerating every single possibility. Anyway, I vaguely recall that I already did in a Stack Exchange answer, which is ironic given the headlined subject, years ago. (-:

Application specific dot-files are sometimes in the user's home directory, but sometimes also elsewhere.

Discovering what registry key controls whatever you are interested in is not at all easier than finding a configuration file, especially because what you need may be dispersed in several keys with obfuscated names that are located in wildly different parts of the huge registry.

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