Please follow the XDG Base Dir Spec

[ghost]

I've noticed this is common in the ledger ecosystem, but please don't make ~/.myappname the default location. It pollutes the home directory.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory

[MatthiasKauer]

Hi,
Thank you for reaching out.

What would you like the default location to be? Could you elaborate or even work on a patch?
Note that I'd rather not distinguish based on OS.

Best,
Matthias

[ghost]

I can work on submitting a PR sometime, but for now I'll say that it should be in "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/tim/config.ini or similar, which is usually ~/.config/tim/config.ini.

[MatthiasKauer]

I'm worried that "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" is not defined on many systems.
It appears to be unset on my Linuxmint/Ubuntu 16.04 and I doubt it exists on Windows.
I'm afraid this may be a non-starter for me.

[ghost]

Only XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set by default through pam_systemd. It is up to the user to explicitly define the other variables according to the specification.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory#Specification

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific configuration files should be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.config should be used.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

[lhanson]

+1, the specification defines default directories so users aren't expected to explicitly set env variables if they're okay with the defaults. If they don't care, then they certainly won't care that there's one less snowflake directory in their $HOME. Many simple libraries exist to derive the correct location in a cross-platform way. Respecting users' preferences is the right thing to do.