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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

As a long time Windows user... I had no idea, nor knowledge of dotfiles. I found this introduction[1] which seems to explain it fairly well, as far as I'm concerned.

I find the idea of having a file system full of links in it a bit odd.... but I only discovered the nest of them in my Windows 10 system a month or so ago with the windows DIR /AL command. I'll have to get over the cognitive dissonance and adjust to this new reality.

1 - https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/dotfiles-what-is-a-dot-fil...

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AFAIK, many Windows apps traditionally tend to use the registry for storing their configs. Which I believe is a similarly odd and foreign idea to most Linux users. On the other hand, before there was the Registry, there were .INI files on Windows too, so kinda similar like dotfiles.

The registry is also just some file or database somewhere in the end.

> I find the idea of having a file system full of links in it a bit odd

I used to be a Mac user. Everything stored settings in resource forks and binary. When I moved to Windows, it was weird to have a registry for most things and some things used .ini files that were more useful. It was nice to have user-readable settings even if they were in obscure places and directories.

When I moved to Linux, dotfiles all made a whole lot more sense.

I've helped others learn how to Linux. Windows hides a lot of things in order to make the user experience idiot-friendly. I've had to un-teach them the crap that Windows teaches them.

> I find the idea of having a file system full of links in it a bit odd...

Windows has the same concept of a PATH, which is where your OS looks for binaries. The difference is that Windows development is, most of the time, not CLI driven, especially if you use Visual Studio and other GUI tools.

Development in Windows is a completely different beast to Linux/Unix.

Windows configuration is just wild. Every program does whatever wherever and the only sane way is to go through every program you install and change all your settings again.

> I find the idea of having a file system full of links in it a bit odd...

Why?

Quite simply, they weren't a thing for decades in the Windows world. There were facilities to do so built into the code and NTFS, but you had to be an administrator to make symlinks or junctions.

The big issue is that backup programs didn't know about them, and would back up things more than once.

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