ZSH dotfiles how to manage | integration of variables/paths from bash | pitfalls

The Water Cooler
1

I did put my request here in the water cooler because I not really know where it would belong.
Would like to make the discussion here and not on Ask, because here we also have a audience with a wider range of knowledge and needs.

I saw a Video about dot-files and i was quite impressed to manage them on the fly and have them stored in a git repository while document the changes.

The bold link shows the Video on the position where

  • My first question came up
    I Asked my selves where to declare the mentioned paths/variables that I do have them available if I log in Wayland or X. Is there a way to “marrie” them, to have them available independent if I just use a shell without a DE, terminal app independent of Wayland or X. The author of the Video solved it for X on a Arch distribution:

The above mentioned path from the dotfile of the Author from the Video.

#XDG Paths

export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config
export XDG_CACHE_HOME=$HOME/.cache
export XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME/.local/share

# zsh config dir
export ZDOTDIR=$HOME/.config/zsh

I tried to test, but I realized very fast, that this gives a big mess while re-login after every change and sometimes also needed to restart.

By the way I made some more searches and also got the article in the Fedoramagazine

My difficulties so far I already related in Ask. If you have some solutions ready for it, you could relate it there.

The objective here would be to have a “Brainstorming” how to achieve it while working in Wayland and X.

2

Note that commands like that work very well for the running terminal but only last as long as that terminal is open & in use. Export puts the value into the current environment but not into the system as a whole when run from a cli.

For those kinds of things to always be effective system wide for a user when that user logs in, opens another terminal window, etc. they need to be inside a script that is activated when the user logs in. Either /etc/zprofile, or $HOME/.zprofile for non-terminal gui environments, or /etc/zshrc or $HOME/.zshrc for terminal logins & terminal windows.