[wpm]

> Given that most software hides dot files by default, where do you see them so often?

I see them when I have to show unhidden files to find some massively bloated folder taking up space or go and manually modify any of the files in those hidden folders, which is quite often! Is it not unexpected to want to navigate to my configuration files? Why is .config hidden? Why not just put it in a folder called "Appropriate-Synonym-For-Stuff-You-Are-Unlikely-To-Want-To-See-Daily/config" I get you're trying to be helpful, but I know that I can hide them and they are hidden by default. The problem is not seeing them. It's that there are 94 top level items in "my" home directory and I'd rather there not be, and yet, I am doomed to suffer this, and I can't most of it because most apps do a piss-poor job of following XDG basedir standards or incorrectly apply them to platforms where they are absolutely not a valid or even sensible specification, and just lazily hardcode their code to pile shit into $HOME/.fucking_garbage.

It is a beyond stupid convention that a . automatically hides a file or folder. It is my computer. Files should always be visible in the GUI or in the terminal. If they should not be for convenience, then that is enough of a "type" or "classification" of a file to group them all together and collapse all that clutter into a folder that is still visible, and easily browsable without switching modes in my graphical file browser or having to add extra flags to commands and what not. Otherwise, the only person who should be hiding anything on my computer is me, via a file system flag (chflags first appeared in BSD 4.4, non-existent on Linux) or manually in the file manager GUI.