I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
I use linux and this annoys me to, every program just spams my home directory with config files, even though .config and .cache exist and are the standard
Set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path> in your environment and most tools follow it
I have, unfortunatly a lot of programs dont.
Right, forgot. And the specific workaround.
Programming tools/IDEs seem especially egregious.
Run
ls -al | wc -lto see the mess. If you can get it below 25, you have a clean setup.