Dotfile madness
Solid rant:
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them.
Let’s see here, in my $HOME
directory:
ls -l | wc -l # => 18
vs
ls -la | wc -l # => 114
96 hidden files! I guess it’s never really bothered me, but that is definitely excessive.
To those of you reading this: I beg you. Avoid creating files or directories of any kind in your user’s
$HOME
directory in order to store your configuration or data. This practice is bizarre at best and it is time to end it.
What do you think, is this a real issue or just a pet peeve?