They are a natural segregator of novice and advanced users.
Yeah, they let that guy in the computer lab who "really knows Unix" show his stuff.
I remember encountering these dot-whatever files back in the day, how changing all the idiotic terminal settings depended on them and how remembering their names or interpreting their values was nearly impossible, and how the cool geeks of the lab had about six seconds of their time available to explain the situation.
99% of all dotfiles that I am aware of are named for the programs that they are for. Bash's start with .bash, Zsh's with .zsh, mplayer is .mplayer, Vim's start with .vim, elinks is .elinks, screen's start with .screen, Dropbox is .dropbox... I'm not sure how any of that is hard to remember. The only real barrier to entry here is knowing that you should look for them in the first place (well, that and the new XDG crap..).
What is actually in them is an entirely different matter.
They are a natural segregator of novice and advanced users.
Yeah, they let that guy in the computer lab who "really knows Unix" show his stuff.
I remember encountering these dot-whatever files back in the day, how changing all the idiotic terminal settings depended on them and how remembering their names or interpreting their values was nearly impossible, and how the cool geeks of the lab had about six seconds of their time available to explain the situation.