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Local config files

Config files and where to find them

This is about local user config files - not to be confused with the system config files under /etc/

File Types

In the old days we had dot-files - worked well for me. These are found in one's home directory /home/user/.
From the shell

$ ls -a

These can be directories or files. Traditionally, each program that needed to store preferences, local cache data would put it in a dot-file using the name of the package.

Some complexity junckies with the gnome project decided we had to change all this - it was working too well.

So they started putting the configs in ~/.config/program-name/files

Not so bad - un-clutters a directory listing. I get it (but would have just had a normal directory called config - but I digress )

Realizing that people could still find what they were looking for - they decided to add two more places:

~/.config/ is where per-user configuration files go
~/.cache is where per-user cache files go
~/.local/share is where per-user data files go

Or so the theory is
So if you are debugging some trouble causing program - you will have to check all three or four places.

Ferinstance - you will still find things under ~/.kde for kde - but also under all the other places. This is not a good-thing.

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