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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That doesn't work well for... well, most software I can think of.

Games: I do not want to backup the entire folder to ensure I have my save files. Modern games are huge. I want my saves to be located somewhere easy to get to (for the average user) and be quick to backup, without having to go in and cherry-pick specific files.
There was a good trend of using Documents/My Games, but sadly that seems to have fractured and now there's also Saved Games, savegames, and some software has moved to using %appdata% or just storing saves in the game install location. There's no consistency, it's a real pain in the hole.

DCC software (Blender, Photoshop, whatever): user preferences and config files. Again, I idon't want to backup the entire software, as I'm likely to reinstall it from an official source when migraing/reinstalling to ensure I have the latest updates. However I do want to be able to backup my preferences or plugins easily.

Any software that allows users to customise it: let me backup those preferences without cloning the entire app.

I do wish there was a standardised folder struture for user data, but it's 2023 and the chances of getting Windows/Max/Nix to agree upon and comform to a generic structure as sadly. The only thing I can think of that's the same across platforms is the .ssh folder.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I don't think Win/Mac/*nix need to use the same structure across different OSs, but it would be nice if applications used conventional paths for within each of those OSs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The different OSes generally have a prescription for where to put things. Windows is a stickler about Program Files and the only thing that should exist there is install content.

My Games and Saved Games is a remnant of times past when they were trying to figure out where to put that stuff. Generally, %Appdata% is where they recommend storing config and files that your application may mutate over time. e.g save files or logs

They just decided it didn't make sense to break that stuff up and not every application dev has caught up to that.

For Mac, the /Library/Application \Support directory is where config files should live. Though some apps support /Users//.config for account level configs.

For Linux, as others have pointed out, /etc for global config or /home//.config for account level config.

The frustration about not knowing where to find things either comes from not knowing the standards or developers not following them. (Or Microsoft changing them every 2 versions)

Edit: Mac uses Users not home.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yep. My main gripe is that due to various developers not catching up with new standards, a users files can be scattered all over the place.

I appreciate that - in theory - %appdata% should contain just a users files, but a number of apps also use it to store program data leading to a huge folder size. My own is >100GB, with some of the largest offenders being python and node dependencies that are not specific to myself, and could really be cached somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

What if they stored the literal files under the installation folder but then linked them under other folders classed as either Saves/configs/creations.

In theory we just need to standardize those few classifications and people could decide where that type of files can be found, always under a folder of the name of the program.

I feel with modern computing it doesn’t really make sense to only find certain files in a single location. The structure you use to create and save digital art may be wholy different from the one you use to browse/show/upload your art. I like to have all my game installations easily accessible for modding but i hate if i had to to use it to launch a game trough the exe. In a way other software may already cater to this need but its often bloated and far from standardized.

While were at it allow people to set a display name for program what they like during installations and if i want to install sm multiple times, why not allow it. the os just remembers what there actually called if other software looks for it, in case of multiple it could ask which one to use.

Of course i can dream what i want, creating new standards is probably one of the hardest thing to agree on and get done.