give me back my home!

In the little artfilm Evil Dead 2, when Ash discovered that his hand had developed a murderous mind of its own, he lopped it off at the wrist. Similarly, I myself have found lately that my Home Directory has begun to develop a mind of its own: it has increasingly been common for a home directory to come pre-populated with folders. At first blush, the pre-fab folders make sense:

• Desktop
• Documents
• Downloads
• Music
• Pictures (sometimes even worse: Photos)
• Public
• Sites (intended as a local website root)
• Templates
• Videos (sometimes even worse: Movies)

or some such variation as that.

On one hand, I was used to this, because my old OS did the same thing, but I’d gotten out of the habit when I switched to Slackware, which handed me an empty /home/seth folder and left it up to me to populate it.

Turns out, those pre-fabricated folders, no matter how hard I try, just don’t work for me. Time to lop it off at the wrist, and here are a few reasons why:

1. I don’t start file names with capital letters. I name files using lowercase-first camel-case: docbookToPdfWithOverrides.txt or williamKenlon_thesisConcert or whatever. Throwing in capital letters at the front of random directories throws off the way files are sorted on a number of apps that I use.
2. The categories are just too broad for me. Just one example: does a “Music” folder contain music I want to listen to? or is it music that I’m working on producing? or is it music I want to use in an audio production? Where do non-musical audio files go? where do I stash sound effects, audiobooks, tutorials, language lessons, sample banks, soundfonts? And that’s just music; the list goes on and on for each category. Sure, I could just create subdirectories in Music, but then I’m just increasing the path, plus the underlying logic is off since in fact the things that ~/Music contains might not be Music. Ergo, at the very least, the folder should be called ~/Audio, not ~/Music.
3. The theory of dumping a bunch of stuff into one folder and letting God sort it out later just doesn’t work. I know I’m supposed to be fine with having one Download folder into which I just dump anything I download, and then I should use some fancy search feature to filter it all out until I find what I was looking for. Now, why would I do that if I have a whole set of downloads that logically can be grouped into a different folder? such as ~/brushes or ~/patterns or ~/src and so on.

So lately the first thing I do when I start a fresh system that comes pre-loaded with these folders is delete them all. It’s amazingly liberating; if any of the above complaints ring true for you, then you should try it for yourself.

OK, let’s say you’ve tried it…now what? Well, start building your own directories! Here are a list of my common on-every-computer directories:

• artkit – raw materials I use in computer art
• amarok – the music i will be listening to for enjoyment
• audio – music and audio productions I’m working on
• bin – those little helpful apps or shell scripts I’ve written that I like to keep on every computer
• cinema – movies I like to watch
• code – my own little coding projects
• docs – documents
• ebooks – you guessed it. ebooks
• mail – my incoming mail spool
• pictures – mostly graphic work I’m doing, but some photos
• sites – websites I’m building
• src – source code
• vids – video files and projects I’m working on

Some systems force me to have a Desktop and a Downloads folder, so I sometimes just have to ignore those, but for the most part I find that a /home decorated by me, for me, is much more comfortable than the pre-fab stuff that ships with some OS’s.

Populate your own home dir for increased comfort and efficiency!