Just like a UNIX file system ends up filled with .dotfiles garbage I didn't ask about to have around.
And better know where they come from, as there is no clean way to safely remove them.
And better know where they come from, as there is no clean way to safely remove them.
Apps are terrible at this on Windows. Sometimes it's in %USERPROFILE%, sometimes in one of the three %appdata% folders, then My Docs, other times in %ProgramData%, and even worse, %PUBLIC%.
There's a registry for a reason, but even Microsoft doesn't use it for x-platform apps.
There are rules when to use what, but usually folks rather code away instead of reading documentation.
cd HKCU:
It’s much cleaner and it comes with a more logical and useful split of config and cache stuff, e.g. you can just skip .cache when rsync-ing to a remote storage instead of having a long list of per-app escapes…
As I don't usually remove programs (or install new ones, for that matter) the scheme that works best for me and many others is "storage/app". In an ideal world a hybrid scheme might be possible, but as it stands now it is not an option and one way has to be chosen over the other.
The problem, as usual, is that apps ignore it and do whatever they want. Such as e.g. using dotfiles directly in ~ instead.
Which one is better - a configuration file in some place or default configuration buried inside binary blob?
I actually really like the way git does it, where it reads each of these in order, last one wins.
- Default configuration compiled in
- Global configuration
- Per-user configuration
- Per-project configuration
You can opt-in to however much configuration complexity you need. Just cloning the occasional thing? Don't bother configuring, the global defaults are probably good enough. Simple commits and pushes? Make a user-level dotfile in your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to set some basic info. Complex per-project aliases? If you want that, go ahead and opt in.
Contrast that with programs that just dump their whole default config into my home dir on first run. Just filling up with nonsense, often no way to tell what I changed or didn’t.
TO DO. /s
Also no one edits text files by hand, we use tools for that, tools that manipulate what is anyway a stream of bytes, whose meaning is given by whatever tool is used to manipulate such stream of bytes.
Makes me want to run off a read-only DVD.
Add a cron job to delete them ? /s