On the latest episode of ATP, Casey, John, and Marco discussed MacOS home directories. After I was done cringing at John keeping his git clones in the root level of his home directory, I started thinking about how I use my own home folder, and how I keep it organized. I won’t go into the hidden items, because I don’t think either of us want that (with hidden items included, my home directory has 34 documents, and 47 folders 😅).
Anyway, here’s my overview…
- Applications - Honestly, all that’s in here are a handful of Shortcuts, and I’m not sure why because I never put them there.
- Desktop - This is empty, because I don’t keep anything on my desktop.
- Developer - Now this is where git clones go. Mostly web projects, a folder for all my work repos, and the Playdate SDK from when I was fiddling with that a couple months ago.
- Documents - Basically just a folder where Divinity: Original Sin 2 keeps its saves, and where I keep various Pages documents and PDFs for some reason (I should probably sort through that at some point)
- Downloads - Self-explanatory. I tend to keep this clean manually and with Hazel scripts, so there’s nothing of note in here at the moment.
- Movies - Empty, except for my TV.app library.
- Music - Same as above, except with my Music.app library.
- Pictures - My Photos.app library, as well as a hodgepodge of scanned photos, drawings, desktop wallpapers, and GIFs I like. All sorted by folder, of course. I’m not a monster!
- Postman - From when I tried Postman, and then immediately switched back to Insomnia.
- Public - I don’t think I’ve ever used this folder.
- Sites - Same as above.
- Sync - A synced folder, used by an app called Sync, that syncs little bits and bobs like shell scripts and Hazel rules between my 2 Macs.
I didn’t bother listing my Library folder because there’s not much to say about that–it’s the same as it is on anyone else’s Mac.
On an additional note, I would really like an iCloud Drive folder in the home directory. I could add one with an alias or symlink, but it just seems weird to me that it’s squirreled away in the Library folder, cryptically named ‘Mobile Documents’.