How do you organize your home directory?
 

hi,

I've got the opportunity to reorganize my home folder atm. but I'm not sure how to do it.

I am betting that most people on here have their home folder very organized, but how do you do it?

nonc

I don't know that I would call it very organized, but I do have a few directories on there to keep things in some sort of order. I usually make directories for documents, music, downloads, images, source code, and a general temporary directory for anything else. I also have a directory for Wine to use as the virtual C: drive, which gives me easy access to all of the Windows applications' files (on machines where I use Wine, obviously).

But it is really a matter of personal taste as to how you go about it.

I just add a few directories: Downloads, Docs, Progs, whatever else when needed.

I copy the Windows folder names since I am used to it. My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, Downloads, etc...

Being geeky as I am, I there are 5 directories in my home folder:

bin - stores executables (ELFs, scripts, etc.) added this to global $PATH to help me develop scripts and programs more rapidly, to allow for better local installs just for my user.
lib - libraries files, sometimes I put programs in here like untar FF and symlink the ELF to 'bin'
opt - school and work stuff, it's optional of course :D
tmp - downloads, is cleaned regularly, parsed to other places (usually var)
var - lots of stuff, takes up lots of space, some stored config files, junk also goes here sometimes

They don't quite match the typical *nix directories, but they're pretty close.

Another reason I did this is so I have less to type on the command line and less chances to misspell ... it's much easier to misspell 'downloads' (hah, I just did it and corrected it from: downleads), docements, I mean 'documents'. Ok, so I misspell things often. But I don't misspell tmp or opt or var or bin or lib. A great solution I think, yeah I'm a geek :)

Not that much of a geek - you forgot to use tab completion which prevents misspelling :)

My home directory is organised as an when I need it - I have a downloads folder, a pictures folder and then I create further folders as and when I need them.

Yeah pretty much the same. I have folders for recieved msn files, documents (i.e. letters etc). The usual stuff. Downloads, packages and my photo work is on a seperate partition where I have plenty of space.

failsafe, portable and usb point to some external drives I have.
bin I added to my path and has little scripts and some apps I've built and don't want in the main system.
downloads is downloads.
images has photos etc.
network has symlinks for samba shares.
src has slackbuilds and other software I'm in the middle of compiling, whilst software has source tarballs for previous builds.
tmp is full or stuff I can't find a place for.
vmware was put there by vmware :)
web has a website I started but haven't finished.

I took some of the windows naming of my pictures and such and dropped the my in front of everything then moved them out from under documents since pictures and music and such are not documents. so I end up with:
home/user/documents
home/user/pictures
home/user/music
home/user/video
home/user/vmware
home/user/iso
home/user/accounts
home/user/projects
home/user/personal

etc.

the whole "my documents" is just too vague for me so I have folders like accounts, projects, personal with such things as bank statements, projects, my resume and such under personal.

Nothing special about mine either. I have bin, doc, mail and tmp as standard on all my boxes. Anything else is specific to what I'm doing on the box. There might be workspace (for eclipse), vmware or Desktop. The only other stuff would be sym links to whatever I'm actually working on.

My distro already creates a Documents directory. I also create a bin directory for scripts. The startup scripts adds it to my path if it exists. I also have downloads, .tmp and podcasts. The podcasts is a link to an nfs mountpoint under /mnt/. I'll create subdirectories in Documents for things like pdfdocs, webarchives, pictures, etc. A temp or .tmp directory is a handy if you use K3B. If it needs to create a DVD image file, it may not fit on the tmp partition.

As far as I am concerned, who ever though up the "My[sp]" prefix deserves to be flogged.

Mine is probably a bit unusual. My home directory is a 1GB flash drive and I alredy had some organized partitions from when I used Windows. I have a ~/Downloads directory and my ~/Documents is a symlink to my old "My Documents" partition from the Windows days. Music, Videos, Pictures, et al were already there. This way, when I do boot Windows I can share the same folders.

I also symlinked Firefox's Cache directory to a dedicated directory under /tmp, then edited my .xinitrc to make sure that directory exists when X starts because I clear /tmp during shutdown. And for the iD games like Quake and Doom I have the save directories symlinked to the save directories on my Games partition.

Much agreed! I started during the days of DOS and Windows 3.11 when there was no designated location for documents. I remember Windows 9x, when a family would share the same C:\My Documents folder. It was cute to call it "My" Documents, but in reality it was more like "Our" Documents. And as viruses and spyware became more widespread, it became "The World's" Documents.

I can still remember this part of a funny tech support story.
TECH: Now click on My Computer.
CUSTOMER: How can I click on your computer?!

A related pet-peeve with W95 & XP is a space in C:\Program Files\. If it weren't for the space, a local non-priviledged installation of Cygwin at work would be possible.

Thats why I dropped the who my thing too. I edited the windows side so the my whatever is just whatever.