Change configuration files location on *N?X systems to .config/filezilla if .config/ exists

[Henry van Megen]

Change default location for configuration files on *N?X systems to .config/filezilla if .config/ exists

I'm contacting all software developers that create software that clutters up our home directories with .<name> folders to have their configuration moved to .config/<name> in accordance with ​https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

There's a long history here when it comes to the general case of "dot files", but the $HOME/.config directories that I specifically mention have an origin in the XDG Base Directory Specification and their environment variables:

• $HOME/.config is where per-user configuration files go if there is no $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
• $HOME/.cache is where per-user cache files go if there is no $XDG_CACHE_HOME.
• $HOME/.local/share is where per-user data files go if there is no $XDG_DATA_HOME.

Windows users may recognize this as a parallel of what Microsoft has had in Windows NT since version 4 (albeit that the names changed in version 6.0):

• %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/ a.k.a. %LOCALAPPDATA% — where per-user data files for this machine go
• %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming/ a.k.a. %APPDATA% — where per-user data files that a roaming user can access from multiple machines go
• %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/Temp/ a.k.a. %TEMP% — where per-user temporary files go

The idea is that per-user files can be (amongst quite a lot of other things) application data files (machine-specific or roaming), application configuration files, cached files, and temporary files, and applications place them in subtrees rooted at these particular directories.

This way we can our keep home directories clean!

Thanks for your time!

[Tim Kosse]

It already is the default.