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Comment by 3eb7988a1663 | Hacker News Reader

I am only on the first page and saw this blurb and was immediately annoyed.

  @/Users/jesse/.claude/plugins/cache/Superpowers/...

The XDG spec has been out for decades now. Why are new applications still polluting my HOME? Also seems weird that real data would be put under a cache/ location, but whatever.

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It's in the cache location because it's a copy of a plugin that was installed from a GitHub repository, so that's not the original point of truth for that file.

I think the point is that ~/.claude should be dispersed among ~/.config/claude, ~/.local/state/claude, etc

I agree with this, it’s frustrating that in 2025 apps are still polluting my home dir.

It's one thing to wish that apps would put their data anywhere except dumping it in your home dir, but this is exactly why I hate the XDG spec. I want all data for a program--be it the configuration or the cache or the binary itself--to be in a single directory such that 1) "uninstalling" the program, completely and in isolation, is nothing more than just deleting that single directory, and 2) any program not doing arbitrary file I/O can entirely function while having access to only its installation directory, and nothing else on the filesystem.

This approach couples together everything though, in such a way there's no standard manner of wiping cache but not your app, configuration, etc.

XDG may not be perfect but wiping related data for apps following it is straightforward. There are a few directories to delete instead of 1, but still consistently structured at least.

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