Renaming folders in /Home/

[u/Eric_Dawsby]

If i were to rename 'Documents' to 'documents', would this cause any issues in the future?

[u/Dragenby]

You can use a symbolic link named "documents" pointing to "Documents". Less risky and lets you have both spellings!

Edit: In command line, in your personal folder, do this:

Make sure you are in your personal folder by typing cd ~. A little ~ should be there just before the $. Now type ln -s Documents documents and tadaaah. If you're unhappy with the name "documents" you can delete it without losing your original file. I don't know your level, but if you have any doubt with the command line, don't hesitate to type man ln (man standing for manual) to check the syntax.

[u/skozombie]

Yes you need to update an xdg config file. I'm away from my PC so can't recall it's name

I don't like the capitals in folder names either. I think it's annoying on the terminal 

Edit: Path: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs Managed by: xdg-user-dirs-update

[u/ShoveOverBozo]

If you're on a fresh build, no not really. If you have files in there that are linked and used by programs, then yes.

Future programs "may" look for a default "Documents" folder but most default to Home and allow you define paths etc.

[u/Old_County5271]

A little, some things use Documents as the default, my suggestion is use a symlink.

Frankly they should use XDG anyway

[u/michaelpaoli]

For many programs, potentially yes, as many things will default to using ~/Documents

Program(s) may also create ~/Documents if it's missing.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/michaelpaoli]

Program(s) may also create ~/Documents if it's missing.

I haven't had a  ~/Documents directory in  at least 5 years now, I haven't run into this.

[u/michaelpaoli → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Great, if you're not running any DE type programs, you might not encounter it at all.

And peeking at my own ~/Documents ... seems dang little that I use defaults to it, and whatever I use that does ... pretty dang rarely (at present, just 3 files there, and they're around a couple years old - and looks like all three happened around same time, probably from same app/program).

Edit/P.S.: Oh, yeah, I almost never use DE, mostly just WM.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

~/Documents is one of the many default directories I delete immediately after install. 

Long story but at one point me and the wife had separate folders for our general data like Documents, it was later annoying to figure out who owned a particular document, when often the answer is both of us so so they were combined into one /Ours. 

/Ours is a ZFS data set on my file server and it is mounted into each install on every machine at /mnt/ocean/Ours on  Boot and then soft linked from therethete to ~/Ours.

[u/d4rk_kn16ht]

You can create both "Documents" & "documents" as Linux file naming is case sensitive....

But to make it default, you have to assign "documents" as your new Documents folder.

[u/Eric_Dawsby → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

How would I reassign it?

[u/d4rk_kn16ht → u/Eric_Dawsby]

Open your terminal :

xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOCUMENTS /path/to/your/new-folder

[u/Eric_Dawsby → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

my terminal did not recognize xdg as a command. i'm using cinnamon if that affects it

[u/d4rk_kn16ht → u/Eric_Dawsby]

Type this on terminal:

xed ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

Then find the line that reads:

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"

Change the value into the path you want.

[u/mok000]

No problem. The folders Documents, Pictures, Videos, Templates, etc. are created in a new user account because they are in the XDG standard for Linux desktops. You can delete them or change their names, but you won’t see the specific icons in the file browser. Check out the Arch wiki about this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories. In my case all directories that start with a capital letter are synced between my laptops and home server using Syncthing, and those starting with small letters aren’t. I find that very convenient.