My homedir is an infernal hellhole of junk accumulated over the past 15 years and I wouldn't have it any other way
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I'd love to keep it clean but too many devs think $HOME is up for grabs, as long as they prepend their directory names with a dot (they think I'll never notice, but I notice, and I keep a list...)
Dafuq are you doing in other people's homes?
Sysadmins are all creeps, confirmed
Breaking pots. Don't mind me.
EDIT: holdup, who are you calling a sysadmin? I administer my system, sure, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go, thank you.
Mine used to be like that, but now my home folder is rehabilitated by turning ~/Documents into a hellhole of accumulated junk instead.
I just prepend everything in the home directory with a dot every 6 months or so, no problems so far
Multiple people in this topic say they organise in directories for different programming languages, something I have never considered and I find it to be an odd way of organising for some reason I can't explain.
Where do you put a project with a Javascript frontend and a Python backend?
for me I consider that a web project so it goes into the typescript folder, if it's backend only then python
Why group it into language instead of say a 'web' directory or 'android'/'mobile'?
I'm just curious, I am more of a 'throw everything in one directory and home I remember what I'm looking for' sort of organiser.
Honestly it's a pretty good way of compartmentalizing projects in your mind.
You usually remember pretty well what language your wrote a project in.
And if you want to find a project again you just have to look in that language's directory.
Second advantage is that if there's a language you only fucked around a little for fun, it doesn't clutter the directories of your most used languages.
My home folders on any OS have a Development folder (which conveniently sits right next to Documents and Downloads) and in that folder, I’ve also got subfolders per programming language that have the respective projects in them.
The other folder I usually have is SyncThing with whatever synced folders are relevant for that machine.
Mine is dev. I avoid capitalizing folder names.
~/3D Objects
~/Homework (porn)
~/aaaaaaa (porn)
~/Stuff (memes, with a porn subfolder)
~/misc (work docs, study docs, forms, some porn)
At least two of these:
~/Stuff
~/Stuffs
~/Stuffz
~/Shits
~/Stuff(1) as well?
No, ofc not, I'm not a degenerate without a plan!!
This isn't a game.
I have /home/username/username/ and I sym link important dirs (like Downloads) to my new home. I strongly dislike all the dot files and dirs cluttering up my home dir.
Are you aware of the ‘xdg-user-dirs-update’ command that allows you to edit the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs config file?
Can you expand on this ?
Not the commenter you replied to, but I change my XDG directory names to be lowercase and start with different letters. For example, Desktop, becomes "drop" (as in pick it up and put it somewhere else) and Downloads is a subdirectory dl. A program that would otherwise save to "Downloads" now saves to "~/drop/dl". When I setup my machines I run a script including the line xdg-user-dirs-update --set DESKTOP "drop" to update the XDG directory and I delete "Desketop". So og commenter has the option of updating their userdirs to be nested in their username if they wanted to avoid symlinking. Here's the relevant arch wiki page and xdg freedesktop page.
It basically allows you to define which paths are used for the Downloads, Documents, Videos, etc.. types of directories.
- /ram - tmpfs filesystem
- ~/.local/bin - added to my path
- ~/.local/software - any user-local program more complicated than a binary gets a directory here. Generally a binary would be symlinked to ~/.local/bin
- ~/.local/venv - shared python venv to use for one liners and small scripts
- ~/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is configured to install from
- ~/.local/repo - local filesystem backed package repository for which the host system is not configured to install from (used for mock, VMs, and external systems).
- /overflow - Used to point to a large secondary hard drive (back when having a small ssd was the economical thing to do. Nowadays, it is just where my large directories go cause I can't be bothered to get used to a more sane setup
Hardware folder (synced via sync thing). All hardware PDFs, notes images etc get subfolders by manufacturer. It is helpful for keeping track of use manuals, firmware or config settings for each piece of hardware.
~/Projects
Archive Archive archive Archive_11_2025
I am not good at organizing
~/proj
~/note
~/sync
~/docs (/book etc)
~/imgs
~/util
~/test
~/temp
I rsync my home folder across installs. These are my standard extra folders.
~/Books, with subfolders by topic.
~/Comics, with subfolders by publisher, then by title, possibly with an intermediate folder for author or franchise.
~/Programming, with subfolders by language, then project.
~/ linux iso's
I just live out of my downloads folder until its time to back up the important stuff to the server and reinstall/ distrohop.
~/dev for code
~/work for things I don't want to do, like taxes
I do similarly, but I use '~/Development' only because I accidentally fucked up my '/dev' dir once using '~/dev'
I always make a bin folder in my home for putting my custom scripts and downloaded binaries. At least on fedora, ~/bin is already in the path, so I don't have to make any additional configuration to make stuff in there become commands for my cli
I usually create ~/git/{github,gitlab,codeberg,AUR,etc} where I clone the git stuff I need.
The rest is usually handled by my nextcloud that creates the ~/Nextcloud folder.
~/.drafts, in which my text editor taskbar shortcut script creates files YYMMDD_text_N. I passionately believe in eliminating the chore of manually naming my spur-of-the-moment notes and text files.
~/progs or ~/bin where loose programs not provided by my package manager reside.
If there's a secondary drive, /media/disk1 as the mount point in fstab.
~/tmp
~/temp
~/temper
~/tempest
~/misc
/mnt/other (symlinked)
I always make a ~/.local/{bin,opt,share} if the distro lacks it. and a ~/bot that I use for my development stuff
Your organization will vary with your usage. If you're looking for something suitable for work, I would highly recommend the PARA approach. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
I've tweaked it to my needs. Combined with fzf, it makes my workflow so smooth and efficient. https://www-gem.codeberg.page/sys_stay_organized/
I want to follow this, and I sorta do... but ADHD makes the P,A and other A basically the same category. And the R is just "stuff I put down to look at but haven't yet".
~/autoclean and a cron job to delete everything older than 7+ days from there. I can just download whatever, throw it in a special folder and it's gone after few days. Keeps my ~/Downloads a bit more clean, easy to store temp txt files to keep track of what I currently have on hand and so on.
~/Projects - for my coding projects
~/Qt - which holds the Qt framework
~/Torrents - For torrents that I share
~/diy for my collection of knitting, crochet and sewing patterns and other assorted diy stuff
~/work duh.
~/tools for my collection of more or less useful small scripts
~/sync for my syncthing folders
~/data symlink to my data partition (most of the others are also symlinks to their location on data)
I don't really have a convention for programming projects yet. They used to land inside of ~/diy or in ~/tools or just random folders on data. I've got a ~/code folder now, but its contents are a mess.
Always backup your tools folder... In the past I only created backups for my "real" code folder and I was quite upset when I lost my small scripts in the last drive death.
Projects for all kinds of projects
aur_builds for the package I use from the AUR. No hand holding here, I build and install my AUR packages artisanally.
~/Brojetos (anything relating to making stuff, writing, drawing, video creation, programming, etc., professional or personal)
~/temp (a non-hidden temp folder with a script that wipes it when the PC shuts down or reboots, used for downloads and such to prevent the "downloads folder is an abomination" problem that plagues any computer after a while of usage)
~/AppsGames (appimages, applications compiled from source and not installed to system, personal use scripts, wineprefixes, non-steam games)
aaaand ~/OtherAminals (for stuff I want to keep but have no idea where else to place)
I usually make src, junk, and applications for appimages and unpackaged binaries