I recently switched my primary machine from Windows 7 to Ubuntu. I'd always
used an Ubuntu VM for development. Now I just have a Windows 7 VM for
Windows-only applications, and do the majority of my work in Ubuntu. I'm fairly
comfortable on the command line, but extremely dislike capital letters in
file paths. So the Ubuntu defaults ("Documents", "Downloads", etc.) just
weren't doing it for me. Fortunately, I found a blog post which
explained which file sets these names
($HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs).
My complete configuration is shown below.
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/dl"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/docs"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/pics"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/videos"