Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Microsoft (and subsidiaries, e.g. 343 Industries), is somehow even worse at adhering to its own norms. Now, I have .vscode and .dotnet folders in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Even Visual Studio creates a stupid %USERPROFILE%\source\repos directory tree, when I never told it to.

I am fed up by this, and have completely given up on maintaining the tidiness of my %USERPROFILE% and %USERPROFILE\Documents. Almost all video games have absolutely no respect whatsoever for OS norms, and just spew their config and save data all over the damn place in %USERPROFILE%\<game title>, %USERPROFILE%\My Games\<game title>, %USERPROFILE%\<developer or publisher>\<game title>. The worst thing is that Windows has a place specifically for video game saves: %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games, or programmatically in C/C++: `SHGetKnownFolderPath(FOLDERID_SavedGames, ...)`.

To add to the mix, I also have GNU/Linux-first programs like SSH, Gradle, etc that just straight-up create dot-directories and dotfiles in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Windows is not Unix/Linux; a dot prefix does not mean 'hidden'. Windows has an explicit 'hidden' filesystem metadata tag that programmers need to (and frequently forget to) set: `SetFileAttributesA(filePath, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN)`.

Home, not so sweet home.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: