Improve zuliprc location/specifying (eg. dot-file or .config/)

[alfonsrv]

Following the configuration of other terminal-configuration files, the default zuliprc file should be called .zuliprc without having to explicitly specify it using the -c switch.

[Jellby]

or ~/.config/zulip/zuliprc

[neiljp]

This was discussed on chat.zulip.org in #backend>storing client settings in May, among other aspects.

From my perspective a dotfile would be good, but standardizing on ~/.config/zulip/zuliprc would be better (or a good addition).

Aspects to consider: (possibly to update later)

• Should we support both .zuliprc and the xdg path? Which takes priority?
• What name should we use within .config? We should check with the main project.
• We could use the (tiny) xdg library to handle the ~/.config aspect, though it's python3.6+ (we use 3.5+ currently)
• We should probably separate zuliprc files and one config file, to allow updating the connection details and config separately

[neiljp]

Another benefit of some kind of .zuliprc/ rather than a simpler file approach, is that this provides a namespace that ZT can use, including treating the filenames (or names without eg. a .zuliprc extension) as names for each server connection.

Since py3.5 is now EOL, this opens up the use of xdg after we migrate to py3.6.

[zee-bit]

@neiljp I too think ~/.config/zulip/zuliprc would be better approach than having a .zuliprc, mainly because having just one sub-directory instead of a number of dot files(for different profiles) and/or dot directories will reduce clutter when "hidden" files are displayed in GUI, and ofcourse pushing all user-configuration files to a dedicated sub-directory is always an attractive solution. :)

• Thus, I believe supporting just the xdg path would be better, because of the above reason. Having a .zuliprc/ directory would still mean one extra clutter in the home directory?
• I am not completely sure what do you mean by "main project"(zulip/zulip maybe?), but we could use ~/.config/zulip-term/zuliprc, hinting the name of the PyPi package that we currently go with?
• Since v3.5 is probably EOL, their shouldn't be any issue with any of these points.
• We could place all the config details in ~/.config/zulip-term/<config-file> this would be common for all organizations. And, all the user-profile for organizations could be placed in .zuliprc/ as you said, but deciding a specific name format should be the main challenge in my opinion. :)

[neiljp]

@zee-bit See #961 for my general thoughts on this, which should clarify some of these points.

Re checking with the main project, I meant what namespace we should use under .config - zulip? zulip-terminal? This could tie in with improving the server/webapp approach to saving/naming zuliprc files, potentially - but for now we would need to rely on users saving/naming them appropriately, unless we generate them.

There is potentially quite a lot of scope for organizing these settings better, particularly where multiple sessions are involved, and we'd need this independently of #961.

I'd expect an end result could now look something like

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zulip/
  org1.zuliprc
  org2.zuliprc
  czo.zuliprc
  zulip-term.conf

with the config from zulip-term.conf being able to be replaced by specifics in org1.zuliprc. We'd retain backwards compatbility via zulip-term -c some_zuliprc (which would pick up defaults from zulip-term.conf), but also have a positional input enabling zulip-term czo or zulip-term org1.

Those names are of course subject to discussion :)

[xeruf]

yes, please follow XDG properly :)

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html