Start cleaning your $HOME!
In this post I introduce the problem of configuration files littering your home folder, and explains the steps I took to regain control of the content of my home folder.
Why in the home folder?
Many software programs create files on your file system. These can be for configuration, storing data or log-files. Historically, and probably because of the lack of a standard, many programs put all their files in your home folder.
My guess to why this would be the case, is that programs want their files on a per-user basis, and $HOME is the directory which is most guaranteed to exist.
A cluttered home
XDG base directory specification
MY home folder
I want to be more extreme in my approach to preventing programs writing to my home folder. Every program should consider the case where the user has no home folder or at least not a writable one. So, that’s exactly what I did.
So I decided to chmod -w’d my home folder 😅. This means it’s not writable.
Programs cannot create/remove file and folders in it.
$ stat -f '%Sp' $HOME
dr-xr-xr-x
The stat program reports that the home directory is only readable and
executable, and not writable, for all users.
Of course, there might be cases where I do want to create files in my home folder. This is still very easy to do:
$ chmod +w ~
$ <commands that create files in ~>
$ chmod -w ~
Done!
One problem though…
Okay, I have to admit that having a non-writable home directory does not come
without problems. One of the bigger problems is that the shell config is also
moved, but this is where the right location is set. This means that the shell
does not know the location of the config, before loading the config. On
MacOS, this can be fixed by setting the environment variable using
LaunchAgents. We can use this to specify code that has to be run upon
booting.