• 2 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 24th, 2023

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  • would you suggest XDG or creating Symlinks?

    You can do both, and both are easy.

    The user-dirs.dirs file contains something like this:

    XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
    XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
    XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
    XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
    XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
    XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
    XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
    XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"
    

    For example if you mount the disk in /media/dirname, it would be something like this, I’m giving it a external-drive name in this example:

    XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="/media/external-drive/Desktop"
    XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/media/external-drive/Documents"
    XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/media/external-drive/Downloads"
    XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/media/external-drive/Music"
    XDG_PICTURES_DIR="/media/external-drive/Pictures"
    XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="/media/external-drive/Public"
    XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="/media/external-drive/Templates"
    XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/media/external-drive/Videos"
    

    And for the symlinks, if the drive already has the Desktop, Documents, etc directories. It is as simple as this:

    ln -s /media/external-drive/* $HOME

    That will symlink all the files in the drive to your $HOME

    I suggest you do both because you might run into a program that doesn’t follow XDG user directories.




  • Folders? you mean directories 👀

    Mount the disk (if you ask me at /media/nameofdir) and configure ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs (99% of that time that would be the .config dir in your home lol) and define each XDG_***_DIR= to the respective directory in the path of the mounted disk, no need to make symlinks, though you might need to because there is likely many apps that don’t follow xdg specs.

    I would really appreciate a GUI way

    I know gnome-disks has a GUI way to change the mount options, I don’t know how good it is though.