A Few Standard Folders [Re: Structure in $HOME]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Claes Holmerson wrote:

> Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 15:12:53 +0100 (CET)
> From: Claes Holmerson <claes it-slav net>
> To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> Subject: Structure in $HOME
>
> (I post this also on kde-devel)
>
> Hi,
>
> I posted a mail to freedesktop.org (titled "Structure in $HOME") with

> https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/xdg-list/2003-January/001015.html

Your focus seems to be mainly on settings and preferences.
I would be very interested to see
$HOME/Documents
$HOME/Images
$HOME/Music
$HOME/Web Pages
$HOME/Video
perhaps more ...

While I dislike the Microsoft naming convention of "My Everything", I
strongly believe that putting default folders in $HOME helps guide and
encourage users to organise their files in a certain way (learnability!).
I believe the Macintosh has some standard folders along the same lines.

If there was a standard Documents folder then I would hope that
applications would offer to save my files their, or more ideally I would
be able to set applications to automatically save to certain standard
directories.
Saving many files off the web gets pretty tiresome, if i want a whole
series of lecture notes for example i would prefer to just save them all
in one place and sort out the naming and filing later (and unless there
are multiple files with the same name i probably wont even want to change
the names).
To look at it another way i would love it if more app's were like Email
and new files automatically got put somewhere sensible and you could
define rules to filter them.

But to get back on topic and is there already some sort of a proposed
standard similar to "My Documents", or who should i be trying to convince?
(I think this has a broader scope than just Nautilus).

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/