Purehome: Watching out for a clean home

Inspired by Gina Trapani's 6 folders strategy, I have, for years now, strived to keep my home directory to 6 folders under which everything is organised. I have gone one step further and define, for myself, what goes in the next level inside those six, but that's another story. Here we care only about the topmost home directory level.

Just like on Windows it was always just a little too convenient to save everything to the desktop when I didn't know where to save something, the root of the home directory seems to be equivalent place in Linux, a place chosen even by many programs, to dump all sorts of random rubbish.

I say no to this, and to help keep my home tidy, I use purehome.

But purehome does not clean my home for me, no, it does not. Purehome works by making me ashamed of having a dirty home, by giving me a constant reminder that I've let myself slip. Purehome gets called in my shell init script, so when I open a new shell, this is the greeting I get:

 ____________________________________________________________
/                                                            \
|  _  _                 _     __      _____  ___  _  _  ___  |
| | || |___ _ __  ___  (_)___ \ \    / / _ \/ _ \| \| |/ __| |
| | __ / _ \ '  \/ -_) | (_-<  \ \/\/ /|   / (_) | .` | (_ | |
| |_||_\___/_|_|_\___| |_/__/   \_/\_/ |_|_\\___/|_|\_|\___| |
|                                                            |
| Superfluous contents:                                      |
|  * this-file-should-not-be-here                            |
\  * quick-thing-i-saved-in-my-homedir                       /
 ------------------------------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Or, in good days, this:

6 days with a clean home directory

Okay, I want it!

Of course you do! Just clone the repository or download the purehome script alone, then call it from your shell init script to have the constant reminder.

Oh, yes, you will only see the cow if you have cowsay installed, but then again, why wouldn't you!

By default, these are the expected directories, no more, no less:

• backup
• comms
• devel
• doc
• media
• other

Of course your directories don't have to be those, just write your expected list, one name per line in a file called ~/.config/purehome/expected or, to be sure, run

purehome --debug

And that will tell you where purehome expects its config to be.

License

MIT