alt Hacker NewsMaybe it's just my pet peeve, but it's less about my documents and mail and more about programs, tools and AI harnesses deciding they can fill hidden dotfile folders at root with whatever they want (which they do indiscriminately). I don't just hate that there's tons of untracked caches and temp file data that isn't easily discoverable, but more specifically, I don't want all that crap in my root directory.
Who decided that hidden folders are a good thing anyways? .agent, .agents, .aws, .bun, .cache, .cargo, .claude, .codex , .config, .docker, .gemini, etc. I just end up having to show hidden folders all the time, which defeats the point.
It's gotten truly ridiculous. I want the OS to strictly enforce my root directory. There should be a few global preference files in there for like .zsh, and everything else organized in proper, unhidden folders.
Replies
> Who decided that hidden folders are a good thing
The grey beards who designed the OS decades ago? Though the lore is the hidden fact of ".dot" was just a bug
> There should be a few global preference files in there for like .zsh,
Why, though, this can more cleanly live in your "config/shell" folder
Ironically enough, the UNIX fathers themselves realized that the hidden files idea was terrible and in the 90s kicked them off completely out of Plan 9 and moved user configs to the $home/lib. And yet we still have our home directories being insanely cluttered with dot files.