[chimprich]

That's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer. A Google search and ChatGPT request provide no answers, so this seems like an uncommon request. It seems like there ought to be a way to achieve this reasonable request though.

Possibly setting it to $HOME would make all/most programs assume that you wanted it to live in $HOME/.tool rather than $HOME/tool, but I'm guessing. I don't know if that's the standard.

[rkta]

I'm not sure it is so uncommon - just that there is no answer. I'm pretty convinced that a lot less people would complain about the XDG Base Directory Specification if that would be possible.

I'm one of those (though I usually do not publicly complain about it).