Linux: Shouldn't the Zotero Data Directory be a hidden directory rather?

thepolice · March 7, 2018

I was wondering why there are two different directories holding Zotero data on Linux - one called '~/.zotero', the other one '~/Zotero'.

Two thoughts on this:

a) Wouldn't it be nicer to just have one directory, one place, holding all the zotero-related data rather than to store it in two different folders?

b) I understand that data stored in the Zotero Data Directory is not intended for direct use or change by the 'normal' end user - 'access' to this data is through the Zotero GUI rather. Since these files should not be accessed directly in normal operation mode, shouldn't it be a hidden directory? I think this is good, general practice in Linux and helps separating data which is exposed to users either directly (e.g. text documents) or not (i.e. hidden, but still available in case of something unusual is going on and needs to be fixed).

Any comments and thoughts welcome...

dstillman · March 7, 2018

I understand that data stored in the Zotero Data Directory is not intended for direct use or change by the 'normal' end user - 'access' to this data is through the Zotero GUI rather

That's mostly true now, but 1) our goal is to make the data directory human-friendly in the future and 2) files in there still get opened directly, either via Zotero or via system search, an OS smart folder, etc. The equivalent directories to '.zotero' (or ~/.local/zotero) are 'Application Support' on macOS and 'AppData' on Windows, and as a general rule files in app data directories shouldn't be opened directly and aren't searched by the system. (A recent change in macOS prevented PDFs opened from Application Support from being re-saved, which is what precipitated the move to ~/Zotero across the board.)

The profile directory, by contrast, 1) needs to be in a standard system location and 2) stores settings that should never need to be opened by the user and shouldn't be searched by the system.

dstillman · March 7, 2018

(Oh, to clarify, in case it predates you, the default data directory location used to be within the profile directory in .zotero, but we moved it out in Zotero 5.0 for the reasons above.)