[000ooo000]

In what world is simply dumping config items for your app in the user's home directory sensible? Why stop at config items? Do cache or temp crap too. The thought process of persisting with this baffles me. Microsoft would be absolutely ridiculed if one day your msword preferences appeared on your desktop as an XML file, and no matter what, it kept reappearing.

[heywoodlh]

Yeah, although, I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft's default config file locations either.

Some examples:

- PowerShell Core's default profile is in $HOME\Documents\PowerShell -- or if you have OneDrive enabled, $HOME\OneDrive\Documents\PowerShell.

- Windows Terminal is $HOME\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json.

I can feel pretty confident assuming that if Microsoft can place their power users' config files for Microsoft's Terminal and Microsoft's primary shell in seemingly unrelated locations and not get huge complaints, I would imagine that most Windows users are probably not people who would ridicule Microsoft for placing an XML file in their home directory.

EDIT: I used these examples specifically, because a Terminal Emulator and shell profile are the exact kind of apps you would store configs for in a dotfiles repo.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Microsoft (and subsidiaries, e.g. 343 Industries), is somehow even worse at adhering to its own norms. Now, I have .vscode and .dotnet folders in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Even Visual Studio creates a stupid %USERPROFILE%\source\repos directory tree, when I never told it to.

I am fed up by this, and have completely given up on maintaining the tidiness of my %USERPROFILE% and %USERPROFILE\Documents. Almost all video games have absolutely no respect whatsoever for OS norms, and just spew their config and save data all over the damn place in %USERPROFILE%\<game title>, %USERPROFILE%\My Games\<game title>, %USERPROFILE%\<developer or publisher>\<game title>. The worst thing is that Windows has a place specifically for video game saves: %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games, or programmatically in C/C++: `SHGetKnownFolderPath(FOLDERID_SavedGames, ...)`.

To add to the mix, I also have GNU/Linux-first programs like SSH, Gradle, etc that just straight-up create dot-directories and dotfiles in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Windows is not Unix/Linux; a dot prefix does not mean 'hidden'. Windows has an explicit 'hidden' filesystem metadata tag that programmers need to (and frequently forget to) set: `SetFileAttributesA(filePath, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN)`.

Home, not so sweet home.

[teddyh]

  desktop.ini