I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
~/.config
is the non-root version of /etc
these days. But you just have to know that, which isn’t ideal.
If you are a developer, please take a look at the XDG Base Directory Specification and try to follow it, users will be very grateful.
Short summary:
Look for for configs and
for state. If they aren’t available, use the defaults (
./config
and .local/share
).