A couple of weeks ago, I published a Red Meat Friday article about the proper place for your Emacs configuration to reside. Like many Red Meat Friday posts, it was tongue in cheek but it got quite a bit of traction. Most, but not all, commenters were against putting it n the ~/.entconfig/emacs directory.
Bozhidar Batsov just published a post in favor of using ~/.config/emacs instead of just ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d. The argument is that it reduces home directory clutter by putting all the configuration files in a single place. I don’t find that a particularly compelling argument.
The thing is, ~/.emacs.d contains a lot more than just your Emacs configuration files. There’s all kinds of things in there including random packages, ELPA files, all kinds of state data, and plenty of other things. Sure, you could put that all into ~/.config but that seems wrong. The vast majority of it isn’t configuration data.
The XDG standard provides places for all that other data too, but that’s a non-starter for me. Who wants your Emacs data scattered among many different directories?
The commenters to Batsov’s post seem mainly to agree with him but we here in the Irreal bunker are going to continue putting all our Emacs stuff in ~/.emacs.d. It was hard enough giving up ~/.emacs.
Of course, as I and others pointed out in the original Red Meat Friday post, none of this matters very much because you can always use symlinks to put your configuration wherever you want it and make it seem as if it’s in the same old place. But if you do that, you’ve recluttered your home directory and added a level of indirection to your files.
Batsov says, and I agree, that ~/.emacs.d is probably never going away. He’s sorry about that.
I’m not.