Technology

37702 readers

482 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

766

All programs should tell you where they store config files (utcc.utoronto.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by wet_lettuce@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

~/.config is the non-root version of /etc these days. But you just have to know that, which isn't ideal.

[–] Jummit@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you are a developer, please take a look at the XDG Base Directory Specification and try to follow it, users will be very grateful.

Short summary: Look for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for configs and $XDG_STATE_HOME for state. If they aren't available, use the defaults (./config and .local/share).

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But what about .local/, or .appname/? It's just a mess

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

~/.local is the non-root version of /usr. By .appname do you just mean a folder that a specific app made in your home for itself? Yeah, I never condone that. imo that's just a badly behaving app. It should move that folder into ~/.config.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Configuration for root is in /root/, that is, root's home directory. /etc is for system configuration, different thing.