| I'm glad people keep writing these "how I set up my computer" articles because it's how I learned almost everything I know - thanks to the kindness of internet strangers. anyway here's my idiosyncratic setup, would probably be terrible for anyone else: everything goes in Dropbox (paid 2TB account) my Dropbox subfolders are organized by broad filetype, e.g. ~/Dropbox/{Code,Documents,Videos,Downloads}
on a new computer I install Dropbox and create symlinks, e.g. /home/rml/.emacs -> /home/rml/Dropbox/Code/personal/config/dot-emacs
/home/rml/.Xinitrc -> /home/rml/Dropbox/Code/personal/config/Xinitrc
/home/rml/Code -> /home/rml/Dropbox/Code
... etc
Because I pretty much live in Emacs and manage files using `dired` I have lots of Elisp code and custom keybindings that take me to my most-used files and directories. For other "tier 2" things I either know where they are due to long habit (most stuff doesn't move or it's obvious which folder e.g. a PDF will be in) or I use a combination of `M-x locate` and `M-x grep` which works pretty well.Re: concerns about "where apps store stuff" I mostly don't care because everything I care about is in Dropbox. If it's something I use a lot, its config is symlinked in wherever the app expects it to be - otherwise everything is a few `dired` commands away. (On macOS `M-x locate` can be configured to use the builtin `mdfind` which works very well for finding things IME. I think it's what drives Spotlight.) At some point I may set up 'recoll' and all that but so far I haven't needed it so I haven't paid the complexity tax of trying to configure that across Windows/macOS/Linux vs. good old locate/grep FWIW because I limit myself to a "standard" set of apps (Emacs, browser, VLC, PDF/image viewer) the above setup works pretty much the same across Windows/macOS/Linux, so most of the time I don't have to care that much which system I'm typing into |