I'm trying to use https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory wherever I can, so for instance my org-roam.db is under ~/.local/state/emacs/org-roam.db. It works great for emacs (Apart from that for the most part it works fine but some applications don't really support it (e.g. Mozilla stuff, Java, Kodi))

I have this snippet near the top of my init.el:

(defconst emacs-config-home user-emacs-directory)
(defconst emacs-cache-home (expand-file-name "emacs/" (or (safe-getenv "XDG_CACHE_HOME") "~/.cache")))
(defconst emacs-data-home (expand-file-name "emacs/" (or (safe-getenv "XDG_DATA_HOME") "~/.local/share")))
(defconst emacs-state-home (expand-file-name "emacs/" (or (safe-getenv "XDG_STATE_HOME") "~/.local/state")))

@UEQPKG7HQ I'm guessing that you then need to tell the various things that litter state around to use those directories?

Yes but the changes I had to make were surprisingly limited

IME, most packages respect the XDG env vars if they're set (org-roam was an exception). This was like a year ago, the situation should be further improved now.

@UEQPKG7HQ where is safe-getenv from?

from here? https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

oh, that's right, forgot to include the function, sorry :man-facepalming:

(defun safe-getenv (env)
  "Provides a safe way to retrieve environment variables from ENV.

Examples TODO."
  (if (bound-and-true-p exec-path-from-shell-getenv)
    (exec-path-from-shell-getenv env)
    (getenv env)))

I had to do this because I was maintaining two versions of emacs on different machines (I think it was 27 and 28) if you're on >=28 you can just use exec-path-from-shell-getenv directly (you don't need the function)

Here's my full init.el too, in case you find it useful (e.g. to see where I had to set the paths explicitly and how): https://github.com/PavlosMelissinos/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/emacs/init.el

heh, I like the WIP comment

I actually want to do a full rewrite from scratch! Thinking about moving to corgi emacs and maybe getting rid of use-package

that is what I'm doing atm. I've done a bit of a speed run through corgi, my own evil config https://github.com/MastodonC/kixi-emacs and now a meow based one that works on guix and on ubuntu (as it is the basis of a terminal friendly team shared emacs config)

I usually rename all my locals with LSP, which makes it renaming all places automatically, there is even a LSP feature called https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifications/lsp/3.17/specification/#textDocument_linkedEditingRange which is just like a iedit but using LSP under the hood (`lsp-iedit-linked-ranges`)

determining intent is hard, too, and I imagine it would get it wrong often enough to be infuriating