This might be obvious for each of us, but I have a simple question. How do you organize your $HOME directory ?

I'm curious to see how people manage their files on their sytstem. Just show us ! Use the command `tree -L 2 ~` to show how your home looks like. And give a quick explanation of it.


My home is organised pretty much like the root of my system. Personnal data
(images, videos, documents) are in `usr/`, source code is in `src/`,
logs/mails/torrents/sockets are going to `var/` scripts to `bin/` and config
files to `etc/` (linked to ~/.* for most). `tmp/` is for downloads and other
crap I go with. I mounted tmpfs to it, so it's flushed at each reboot :)

Pretty much the same as yours:

Fuck. That equality between our systems starts to be insane !

We don't have to be worried about that as long the configurations of wm, shell and term colors are different.
And it proves that good taste knows no borders :P

266 directories, 377 files :)
Yes i have a ~/Music folder with no sub directories (I just dump every Album i acquire in there)

Ah, I see :P Just use -L 1 then, to show us the basics of your organisation ;)

All of my scripts are in ~/.bin, not ~/bin. All of the configs are in their usual places, dumped into ~. A few are symlinked to a Git repo of dotfiles in ~/.dotfiles, but most of them aren't. I prefer to keep them hidden so the messiness of my ~ doesn't annoy me. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

I like your home directories, Neuromatic and z3bra, nice and neat. towa: we both do sort of the same thing, it's not neat, but it's easy and works.

Maybe I'll reorganise my home directory, though...

EDIT: I decided to succumb to peer pressure and rename some directories.

Woah yrmt ! How do you find your path in here ? :O

13 directories, 0 files

(04-04-2014, 08:46 AM)z3bra Wrote: Woah yrmt ! How do you find your path in here ? :O

I have no binaries in my ~. I like having them at /usr/pkg/*

Wow everyone is so tidy.
I'll post the tidiest of my home dir between my 2 installs.

You guys caught me at a good time. I just did some spring cleaning. Most of my stuff is on /dev/data and symlinked.

i removed the contents of my downloads, music, and video folders for brevity.

Not output, but probably something like what it'd eventually be:

• bin: Standard local bin directory that gets added to the path.
  
• books: Divided by author.
  
  • txt: Non-fiction (e.g. textbooks) which are further subdivided into general categories.
• dl: Theoretically, I guess there shouldn't be a downloads directory if I've organised my folders properly, but I still have one because... sometimes I feel like downloading first and managing later so I just make the appropriate directories and dump them there for the time being. Then I can later finely comb through the downloaded things and pick the ones I actually want. (When initally downloading, it's too slow to figure out at hand if I really want it or not.) And images refers to iso's, not actual images which usually easily find their place in `pics`.
  
  • torrents: Rtorrent's directory because it just made sense to put it in `dl`.
• docs: Important documents, usually directly placed in the `docs` folder itself.
  
  • archive: The important documents are placed here once they are dealt with (no longer currently relevant), (filename) ordered by date.
    
    • www: A bit different, just a place to put interesting (usually internet) articles (usually from rss) in a date ordered form too. So it makes sense to put it in `docs/archive`.
  • email: Makes sense to put in `docs` since emails are commonly related to the important documents (important emails).
    
  • uni: If there are many important documents that form their own category, then more folders will be created, such as this `uni` directory. (So a folder will be created for a particular (non-software) project etc.)
• dv: Things I'm making/hacking on that I have commit access to.
  
• etc: Don't actually have this yet. But once I figure out how to manage my dotfiles under git version control, I'll probably use `etc` as the folder for it. Other names could have included `conf` or `dots` or `dotfiles` but `conf` is four letters where `etc` is three and `dots` and `dotfiles` don't work since there's already `docs`. `rc` is also a viable option though.
  
• games: For roms, save states, cheats, stats references, walkthroughs etc. divided by game.
  
• src: Like a catch all for more source code stuff (which isn't being directly hacked on like in `dv`).
  
  • aur: For, well AUR packages, since the operating system is nearly always arch. I guess it's not a good thing to have os-specific things but it just makes sense since I usually use arch anyway. I should probably just be using the abs or something for this instead though...
    
  • builds: Area for building random things, fairly useless but not much harm in keeping it there.
    
  • code: Place to put source code that I want to store, usually for studying/learning but sometimes just for the storage.
    
  • pkg: For PKGBUILDS (that I maintain or are just personal). Again arch specific and should just be the abs. Why I put `ports` there as well, that could just be a local abs directory, except that it doesn't sound os-specific.
    
  • scripts: Collection of the rest of useful scripts which didn't make it to `bin`.
• tmp: Temporary dumping/playing around with directory. Mostly useless, but sometimes useful and probably deserves to exist.
  
• Rest are self-explanatory. I like to have all my consumables directories directly under home rather than have a separate usr/var/media directory for all that.
  

(10-08-2014, 05:23 AM)rwzy Wrote: Not output, but probably something like what it'd eventually be:

Code:

╾─┐ ~
  ├── bin
  ├─┐ books
  │ └── txt
  ├─┐ dl
  │ ├── fonts
  │ ├── images
  │ ├── themes
  │ └─┐ torrents
  │   ├── session
  │   └── watch
  ├─┐ docs
  │ ├─┐ archive
  │ │ └── www
  │ ├── email
  │ └── uni
  ├── dv
  ├── etc
  ├── games
  ├── music
  ├── notes
  ├─┐ pics
  │ ├── art
  │ ├── gifs
  │ ├── memes
  │ ├── photos
  │ ├── scrots
  │ ├── sprites
  │ └── walls
  ├─┐ src
  │ ├── aur
  │ ├── builds
  │ ├── code
  │ ├── pkg
  │ ├── ports
  │ └── scripts
  ├── tmp
  └─┐ vids
    ├── clips
    ├── doco
    ├── football
    ├── movies
    ├── music
    ├── pods
    ├── shows
    └── talks

• bin: Standard local bin directory that gets added to the path.
  
• books: Divided by author.
  
  • txt: Non-fiction (e.g. textbooks) which are further subdivided into general categories.
• dl: Theoretically, I guess there shouldn't be a downloads directory if I've organised my folders properly, but I still have one because... sometimes I feel like downloading first and managing later so I just make the appropriate directories and dump them there for the time being. Then I can later finely comb through the downloaded things and pick the ones I actually want. (When initally downloading, it's too slow to figure out at hand if I really want it or not.) And images refers to iso's, not actual images which usually easily find their place in `pics`.
  
  • torrents: Rtorrent's directory because it just made sense to put it in `dl`.
• docs: Important documents, usually directly placed in the `docs` folder itself.
  
  • archive: The important documents are placed here once they are dealt with (no longer currently relevant), (filename) ordered by date.
    
    • www: A bit different, just a place to put interesting (usually internet) articles (usually from rss) in a date ordered form too. So it makes sense to put it in `docs/archive`.
  • email: Makes sense to put in `docs` since emails are commonly related to the important documents (important emails).
    
  • uni: If there are many important documents that form their own category, then more folders will be created, such as this `uni` directory. (So a folder will be created for a particular project etc.)
• dv: Things I'm making/hacking on that I have commit access to.
  
• etc: Don't actually have this yet. But once I figure out how to manage my dotfiles under git version control, I'll probably use `etc` as the folder for it. Other names could have included `conf` or `dots` or `dotfiles` but `conf` is four letters where `etc` is three and `dots` and `dotfiles` don't work since there's already `docs`. `rc` is also a viable option though.
  
• games: For roms, save states, cheats, stats references, walkthroughs etc. divided by game.
  
• src: Like a catch all for more source code stuff (which isn't being directly hacked on like in `dv`).
  
  • aur: For, well AUR packages, since the operating system is nearly always arch. I guess it's not a good thing to have os-specific things but it just makes sense since I usually use arch anyway. I should probably just be using the abs or something for this instead though...
    
  • builds: Area for building random things, fairly useless but not much harm in keeping it there.
    
  • code: Place to put source code that I want to store, usually for studying/learning but sometimes just for the storage.
    
  • pkg: For PKGBUILDS (that I maintain or are just personal). Again arch specific and should just be the abs. Why I put `ports` there as well, that could just be a local abs directory, except that it doesn't sound os-specific.
    
  • scripts: Collection of the rest of useful scripts which didn't make it to `bin`.
• tmp: Temporary dumping/playing around with directory. Mostly useless, but sometimes useful and probably deserves to exist.
  
• Rest are self-explanatory. I like to have all my consumables directories directly under home rather than have a separate usr/var/media directory for all that.
  

I really like your structure, its clean and concise. Now to work on mine!

mine is combined work and home file structure... I can't even show my src folder because there are too many directories. Folders in ~/Mine/0-99 are typically documents of specific projects or categories (there are often sub-folders within these as they represent larger categorical folders)

I opt for a more semantic approach to my file folders.

─┐ .
├─┐ work
│ ├── 00 - Operations
│ ├── 01 - Administrata
│ ├── 02 - Vendors
│ ├── 03 - Training
│ ├── 04 - InfoSec Program
│ ├── 05 - Clients
│ ├── 98 - Software
│ └── 99 - Scratch
└─┐ mine
├── 00 - Backups
├── 01 - XYZ
├── 02 - Family
├── 03 - Me
├── 04 - FST
├── 05 - PE
├── 06 - School
├── 09 - Misc
├── 10 - Projects
├── 98 - Software
├── 99 - scratch
└── src

so since my last post in 2014 my home dir has changed some.


the main directories are now:
bin - utility scripts i run. everything from color scripts to touchpad togglers.
dotfiles - configuration files symlinked all over the place.
downloads - a horrible mass of unorganized files.
lib - the library. i keep most of my personal files here. everything from images to music to ansi art.
src - source code. a mix of things i've written and other applications i run on my system.

pretty simple, I keep most of my dots in ~/.config and subdirectories based on use, format or for music artist/albums/songs.

Here's my new clean home:

There are a lot of programming projects (of course), bin is quite full, no doc/ (moved it to /usr/local after not wanting it to fill up my backups). text/ contains some literature projects and other texts that are important atm.

Highly inspired by z3bra's home (thanks to his blog).
I'm keeping everything as clean and structured as possible.

and are git repos to keep everything synced and backed up.

notice the beginning letter of each directory is unique for fast tab completion!

~/tmp is a ramdisk
~/var is a mess
~/xfer is "downloads"

my bin-folder is symlinked to my dotfiles/scripts/bin folder. Not much there right now, but i had the idea to do that a while ago....
my code is on my 2nd ssd on my desktop - therefore it's linked there... on my other pc's it's just the code folder by itself.
the data folder is a mounted 3tb disk with my movies and the contents of my dropbox. That's where most of my mess is created and persisted...
Didn't know steam created a *.desktop file... whatever.
Documents is the place where i store temporary documents that i don't really need. i clean that up every once in a while. Seems like Hard West (great game btw) stores it's saves there.
Downloads is pretty self-explanatory. I have a weekly cron-job that just deletes the stuff there.
ssd is the mount-point for the aforementioned 2nd disk where i currently only have code and games...

(27-06-2017, 02:25 PM)mrtn Wrote: I have a weekly cron-job that just deletes the stuff there.

Make it a tmpfs in addition :P
This is what I have done recently. Besides that nothing changed.

That's actually a pretty good idea. Will go at it at the weekend.

Output of (the -F puts a / after directories to tell what is a directory and what is a regular file). I edited the output to put a ... where there are a lot of files and to remove some stuff.

Stuff currently on my home directory:

• ~/.profile and ~/.xprofile are the only dotfiles in my home. They set my home.
  
• ~/.config/, ~/.cache/, and ~/.data are the only dotdirectories in my home, they are for XDG compliant applications. I have set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $XDG_CACHE_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME to these directories.
  
• ~/files/ is for media and other files.
  • ~/files/doc contains my non-fiction books
    
  • ~/files/mus contains my musics
    
  • ~/files/mov contains my movies
    
  • ~/files/lit contains my fiction books
    
  • ~/files/meme is my meme folder
    
  • ~/files/ego is where I put personal stuff like family photos and videos.
    
• ~/gpg/ contains my gpg keyring and files with my passwords encrypted with my gpg key.
  
• ~/mail/ is my mail directory.
  
• ~/proj/ is the directory where I put whatever I am working on now. each project has a subdirectory on it. Most projects are college stuff and things I am learning or programming. There is a ~/proj/rice/ directory where I put ricing ideas and plans.
  
• ~/tmp/ for downloaded files and where I dump stuff. I try to keep it clean, but most of the time it is a mess.
  
• ~/usr/ is where I put configuration, binaries and other files of applications. Each subdirectory is for a different application.
  • ~/usr/X/bin have some scripts for X, like samedir, that opens a terminal in the directory of the current window; drawterm, that I have stolen from z3bra, etc. ~/usr/X/cursor have my cursor, ~/usr/X/fonts/ for my fonts. ~/usr/X/rules/ have configuration files for X, like xresources, xcompose, etc.
    
  • ~/usr/dmenu/bin/ for dmenu binary and some dmenu wrapper scripts. ~/usr/dmenu/man contains dmenu's manpage. ~/usr/dmenu/src/ contains dmenu's source file.
    
  • ~/usr/i3/bin have i3 scripts and ~/usr/i3/rules have i3 configurations
    
  • ~/usr/bar/* contains stuff for lemonbar
    
  • ~/usr/wmaker/* have wmaker stuff, I use both i3 and window maker.
    

There are some directories I want to implement in the future:

• ~/skel/: have templates and skeleton for other directories, for example, ~/skel/c/ will have the skeleton of a C program I write, etc.
  
• ~/trash/: I want to write a script that send stuff to ~/trash/ and keep track whence it came from.
  
• ~/app/ for desktop files. I want to create a dmenu script that spawns desktop applications, and I will keep each application in a directory at ~/app/
  
• ~/fav/ for bookmarks: symlinks to commonly used files.
  
• ~/rec/ for recently used files. I want to edit my open script (a script that opens whatever I give as argument with a proper application) so that it creates a symlink to whatever I open at ~/rec/ so it contains my recently opened files.
  
• ~/mnt/ where I mount my usb devices. I want to configure automounting or write a dmenu device mounter that mount stuff on ~/mnt
  
• ~/tmp/ram: a tmpfs.
  

Mine's a mess (thanks to experimenting/trying out/playing around with too many programs that have their own idea of where things should go) and I'm not going to show it to you.

I'll just say that I've been trying to use some shorter names for common directories. Here are the ones that are most often disrespected, so I'm making do with symlinks to my shorter-named dirs:

Documents --> doc
Pictures --> pix
Videos -> flix
Downloads --> xfr

[Edit: I'd forgotten about ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs until posting this prompted me to go back into my notes to remember how to change these directory names.]

My music library is in ~/music, with subdirs artist/album.
Audio files other than music go in ~/snd
I've thought about shorter names for the music directory. "tunes" is nice, but no shorter.
I've also thought about moving "music" under snd, along with "playlists" and a "genres" directory as a mountpoint for pytagsfs. Maybe someday.

[edit: "playlists" is now "m3u".]

Of course I also have
bin
src
etc
lib
include
man
share
tmp
var
www

[edit: I moved "share" under ~/.local ]

You guys have some good ideas, however, that I might have to steal!

Here goes, I guess:



I feel like it's fairly standard. Unlike a lot of you, I've opted to go for directories with long names. There are a few reasons for this, but the main ones are for readability, and because talking programs pronounce them better (I don't use one at the moment, but I have done in the past quite heavily). As long as the starting characters are unique, I see no particular benefit to switching to shorter ones.

I don't really like dotfiles at all, so as much as possible have them exposed to the world. My lib folder is an idea stolen from plan9 iirc, and is my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. There are two configuration files which aren't in there: my profile, and mg (which doesn't seem to support alternative configuration locations). The profile has a quite extensive selection of environment variables used to push everything into lib, and there are a couple of aliases in lib/shellrc for the more difficult programs.

I store things I'm working on in projects, regardless of whether they're code. I don't do games much these days, but they have their own subdirectory to keep them separate.

I use nmh to access my mail, and occasionally mutt. I don't have a complicated workflow, just grab messages from my spoolfile and stick them in the inbox folder, then delete them or move them to the archive folder. I tend to keep my computer offline a lot of the time, though, and use the wired and msmtp-* scripts to sync and send messages when I'm connected. The wired script also updates all my RSS feeds in newsboat.

Stateless is my downloads directory. Like a lot of people here, it's mounted as tmpfs.

The documents folder is where most of my other stuff goes. There's a links file which holds a dump of bookmarks and sites of interest (which was meant to be in a nice, unix and human readable format, but unfortunately I haven't really kept to it). The papers folder holds PDFs and epubs. Personal holds my passport photo and a couple of other things like that, school holds educational notes, scores holds sheet music, show-notes used to be a daily journal thing, songs is for songs, chords, and lyrics, text is for miscellaneous grabs of articles I've found interesting and want to keep around, and website is (naturally) my website.