On structure of the home directory

I’m thinking again of following into Joey Hess’ steps and putting all my stuff into VCS (namely, git). Right now I’ve got my public dotfiles under version control (and published at GitHub for the world to see), and I also keep a few directories under git-annex, but that’s it. I wonder what my life would look like if I keep everything but /tmp under VCS…

So I’ve been reading Joey’s notes on living like that, starting with the one he wrote back when he had his home dir checked into CVS. One of the things that astounded me is how similarly strict we are regarding the top-level structure of our home directories. Here’s Joey’s listing:

joey@silk:~>ls
CVS/  bin/  debian/  doc/  html/  lib/  mail/  src/  tmp/

and here’s mine:

% ls                                                                ~
audio/    docs/     misc/   pictures/  urls    words
Desktop/  library/  music/  torrents/  video/

Motivation behind this strictness is different for us — I try to keep things tidy so ls -l listings span no more than one screen, and for Joey it was CVS that made him think about proper location and the name of the file upfront. That’s an interesting thought, by the way: by making it hard to move files around, CVS facilitates better names and file structure. Less is more.

And that ~/tmp is plain ingenious. Experimenting with things in /tmp is kind of second nature to me, so I sometimes suffered from the pain of loosing some interesting code I wasn’t done with because of reboot. But dedicated tmp dir inside my home directory should solve the problem in an easy and simple way. Thanks Joey!

Windows desktop so polluted with icons that you can’t even see the wallpaper is a byword nowadays. I wonder how many Linux users keep their home directories as clean as Joey’s. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line regarding this!