I was a bit amused as I read today in the freshmeat newsletter: "... A priority is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org." since XFCE misses the IMO most important (ok, maybe not) standardization effort of freedesktop: the use of the $HOME/.config/ directory to get rid of the hundreds of (not really hidden) dotfiles in users home dirs. http://freedesktop.org/Standards/config-spec Actually that recommendation talks about some XDG_whatever variable and "~/.config/" only as fallback, but nevertheless - that's what I'm asking for. Sure XFCE has already some new environment variable (every program has a different!) one could use to redirect config file scans to ("XFCE4_HOME" or so?) and I could eventually hack that myself into the source. But I'd actually like to see this supported by default. There is no need to abandon "~/.xfce4/" now or completely, but the libs/apps should also check for existence of "~/.config/xfce4/" and use that when it's there (the old "~/.xfce4/" furthermore only as fallback). Some users may prefer to keep it by its current name, others (me) may like the important config files in _one_ directory, so for example automated backup scripts could more easily find it. Please think about it. And it's probably easy to code in anyhow!
- Such sarcastic comments tend to make me in a bad mood! - What you are talking about is not a spec, it's a plan! - Xfce doesn't use gconf and won't unless gconf becomes a standard - All config files are in $HOME/.xfce4/ ie its in one directory!
BTW, I think using "XFCE4HOME" will do the trick (although not all plugins make use of it in 4.0.6, notable exceptions being xfwm4 and iconbox plugins - That ashould be fixed in CVS)
Wasn't meant to be sarcastic or something that way, it just read somehow funny from my point of view :) (I had only this weekend got a copy of the xfce4 tarball, and was pretty happy to see a bugfix release [cropped icons] only two days later; that is I've almost converted from many years of using blackbox/openbox). Btw, I'm also really thankful that you don't use gconf (not really useful thing as of yet, and there better / more lightweight alternatives). I know you only put one dot directory (.xfce4) into the $HOME dir, but still this adds to the many others that shouldn't be there. That's because many other 'open file' dialogs often simply show _all_ files, and so home dirs get really poorly browseable over time. I found myself constantly deleting a few, but it's almost like www popups these days (if it wasn't that I use mozilla/fox ;) Whatever, you aren't interested in that ~/.config/ thing (plan or spec) at all? Could it be made working anyhow, or would every xfce extension need to be patched - I thought that mcs* lib was for config access?
Put this in your ~/.bash_profile: export XFCE4HOME=/home/milky/.config/xfce4
Jasper, thanks for the personalized example; but I actually already knew about how to do that for most my apps. The only problem I see is that this way I only exchange home dir dotfile cluttering for environment var cluttering. That's what my bashrc then needed to look like if I really wanted to get rid of some files: export XFCE4HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4/" alias centericq="centericq -d $HOME/.config/centericq/" export INPUTRC="$HOME/.config/inputrc" alias mutt="mutt -F $HOME/.config/muttrc" export HISTFILE="$HOME/.config/bash/history" and so on... Also I wouldn't really trust that setup, even I could imagine it would work better for XFCE - especially since I could put something like this in in the xinitrc: XFCE4HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4/" xfce-mcs-manager XFCE4HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4/" xfwm --daemon XFCE4HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4/" xfdesktop & XFCE4HOME="$HOME/.config/xfce4/" xfcel-panel But whatever, I'd still say that's only a workaround. Btw, the link from the first post didn't actually point to the real specification (it's not only a plan or idea anymore). This is the thing I was actually talking about: http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html The spec talks about $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and "$HOME/.config/" as its default, and how apps should throw files into it. I still believe this is a great idea, it's only sad that this never got part of the FHS. Please, please, please reconsider adding some general (as fallback) support for it. There were some notes about your session manager on your WordPress site, and it actually read like that part having already support for a ~/.config/xfce4/ dir in it.
AFAIK no-one is using this yet, so it won't help you much anyway. I'm not against this on principle -- in fact, I do like the general idea -- but, it is by no means needed for proper operation of xfce, so it is very low priority. Remember, the important specifications are the ones that promote interoperability, like the EMWH and XSETTINGS specifications, this one buys us nothing.
postponed to 4.4
for 4.2 anyway
This should now work for all components. Please verify.