How-to: Change default desktop directories

Something that I feel is a holdover from back when I used fedora was the separate entries in the home directory. I prefer not to store everything in my home directory on my desktop like Ubuntu loves doing. This is how to change the default directories for your documents, desktop, pictures, music, and everything else.

I make the assumption that people would want to use leafpad, another holdover from fedora, you can replace it with any text-editor you like, kate, nano, vi, etc

Code:

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leafpad ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

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It's very well commented, and it's mostly user preference what they want each to be, but in mine I set it to:

Code:

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

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Please log out and log in to see the changes, This should make things a bit cleaner for your desktop, and for me, it's the first thing I do when I work in any Ubuntu system. Hope you enjoyed this little tweak as much as I do.

Thanks for this. Iv been putting off figuring out how to do this (/Google it) you just made it a whole lot easier.