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My $HOME

2018-09-03

Recently, I came across a blog posting titled "$HOME, sweet $HOME", where @blinry advocates for structuring your $HOME directory based on projects and their activity. After reading this I felt inspired to finally have a look at the mess I made of my $HOME in the last years.

A few things about my old $HOME:

  • Documents contained basically everything I had accumulated during the last years besides music, videos, pictures and source code.
  • projects just contained one gigantic folder of all projects that I ever worked on.
  • the rest was based on the default xdg-user-dirs

If you sorted the files by file type like the default XDG directories suggest, files from one project may be scattered across many different directories.

So my goal for the new $HOME was to have a clean directory structure where:

  • it is obvious where to place new files
  • paths do not become too long to type out
  • the directory structure relates to how I work

A quick tour of my new $HOME:

  • lib for immutable files
  • src for mutable files
  • tag stores links to projects
  • tmp for unsorted files and downloads

The project directory

All of my projects are stored in src. I use a flat directory structure, where every project has its own subdirectory based on its name. Projects can become part of one or more larger contexts through the use of tags.

Tags

Tag directories are stored in tag. Each directory stores symbolic links to parts of a project that can be distributed around lib and src. One possible use for the tag directories is creating workbenches. If I use some directories in lib or src in different contexts, tag can be used to include them in multiple workbenches.

An example workflow

$ cd tag
$ mkdir -p course1/examples
$ ln -s ~/src/example1 course1/examples/
$ ln -s ~/lib/courses/course1 course1/material
$ rm -r course1

I create new tags for various reasons, but mostly one for each larger context (e.g. work, hobbies, admin foo, thesis, courseXY) and some more for tracking project activity. There are four different tags in tag directory right now for tracking project activity:

  • permanent
  • active
  • hold
  • dead

Workflow

Basically this