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0 pointsjoe_the_user13y ago0 comments

Lol,

They are a natural segregator of novice and advanced users.

Yeah, they let that guy in the computer lab who "really knows Unix" show his stuff.

I remember encountering these dot-whatever files back in the day, how changing all the idiotic terminal settings depended on them and how remembering their names or interpreting their values was nearly impossible, and how the cool geeks of the lab had about six seconds of their time available to explain the situation.

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jlgreco13y ago

99% of all dotfiles that I am aware of are named for the programs that they are for. Bash's start with .bash, Zsh's with .zsh, mplayer is .mplayer, Vim's start with .vim, elinks is .elinks, screen's start with .screen, Dropbox is .dropbox... I'm not sure how any of that is hard to remember. The only real barrier to entry here is knowing that you should look for them in the first place (well, that and the new XDG crap..).

What is actually in them is an entirely different matter.

nakkiel13y ago

Perhaps the op prefers to use the registry to store settings.. After all HKEY_XXX1230_APP_123 is so friendly.

ansgri13y ago

Excuse me, but much more typical example is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MiKTeX.org\MiKTeX\2.9\Core. The registry has rather respected conventions.

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