My $HOME

Recently, I came across a blog posting titled $HOME, sweet $HOME, where @blinry advocates for structuring your HOME directory based on projects and their activity. After reading this I felt inspired to finally have a look at the mess I made of my $HOME in the last years.

A few things about my old $HOME:

If you sorted the files by file type like the default XDG directories suggest, files from one project may be scattered across many different directories.

So my goal for the new $HOME was to have a clean directory structure where: - it is obvious where to place new files - paths do not become too long to type out - the directory structure relates to how I work

A quick tour of my new $HOME:

The project directory

All of my projects are stored in src. I use a flat directory structure, where every project has its own subdirectory based on its name. Projects can become part of one or more larger contexts through the use of tags.

Tags

Tag directories are stored in tag. Each directory stores symbolic links to parts of a project that can be distributed around lib and src. One possible use for the tag directories is creating workbenches. If I use some directories in lib or src in different contexts, tag can be used to include them in multiple workbenches.

An example workflow

cd tag
mkdir -p course1/examples
ln -s ~/src/example1 course1/examples/
ln -s ~/lib/courses/course1 course1/material
rm -r course1

I create new tags for various reasons, but mostly one for each larger context (e.g. work, hobbies, admin foo, thesis, courseXY) and some more for tracking project activity. There are four different tags in tag directory right now for tracking project activity:

Workflow

Basically this