[HN Gopher] Using XDG-Compliant Config Files (2024)
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       Using XDG-Compliant Config Files (2024)
        
       Author : ankitg12
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2026-06-04 12:54 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (wxwidgets.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (wxwidgets.org)
        
       | froh wrote:
       | is this aspect also cross platform? like supporting Windows
       | %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% ?
       | 
       | likewise for ~/.cache ($XDG_CACHE_HOME). does wxWindows provide a
       | cross platform abstraction for the cache dir, too?
        
         | bt1a wrote:
         | Genuinely curious- what would the cross platform compatibility
         | help with? Ease of migration? I don't remember configuring many
         | win programs with notation like such, just the PATH
        
           | mpyne wrote:
           | There are Qt analogs for just this thing (QStandardPaths,
           | https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qstandardpaths.html) to drastically
           | simplify what can be a quite annoying task if you're trying
           | to write GUI software that respects the OS standard file
           | locations across multiple desktops.
           | 
           | This is a different problem than migrating file locations in
           | the same OS, as what the linked blog post is about, but it is
           | a related issue for apps intending to be multi-platform.
        
       | Chu4eeno wrote:
       | > XDG Base Directory Specification has been a standard for
       | organizing application data files under Linux for a long time.
       | Unfortunately, wxWidgets has been around for even longer, and
       | when support for configuration files was added to it back in
       | 1997, the usual convention was still to put these so-called "dot
       | files" directly in the user home directory
       | 
       | Who do they think defined this standard, if not the people who
       | had "been around even longer".
       | 
       | IIRC KDE was first with cleaning up the clutter by hiding things
       | in ~/.kde or something like that, but there's a ton of
       | config/bookmarks/menus/data/caches you want to everything to use,
       | so it was a given that there would be some standardization.
        
         | hurricanepootis wrote:
         | I'm on KDE 6, and I don't have a ~/.kde. I think now a days,
         | KDE uses ~/.config and ~/.local/share. Honestly, sometimes I
         | wish the KDE Frameworks had a thing like Dconf, so apps can
         | store their configurations inside of a database instead of
         | barfing everything out into a ~/.config folder.
        
         | rrvsh wrote:
         | What is your point here?
        
       | dbalatero wrote:
       | Hopefully the migration function doesn't silently move files. If
       | you have dotfile symlinks, those would need updating. Also it
       | would be surprising if config files were in a new place one day.
        
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       (page generated 2026-06-09 05:01 UTC)