Tip of the day: prevent iceweasel from mkdir ~/Desktop

If you’re a Unix person instead of e.g. a Microsoft® Windows® person, you’ve probably been annoyed by Iceweasel (or Mozilla™ Firefox®) creating a ~/Desktop directory, among others (things like ~/Downloads).

Here’s a quick fix I found somewhere in the ’net:

mkdir -p -m0700 ~/.config
cat >~/.config/user-dirs.dirs <<'EOF'
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"
EOF

Upon next start, Iceweasel (and other XDG-compliant applications) will throw stuff into ~/ instead.