Setting up a new mac to avoid "system" folders like Documents, Music, Desktop, etc

As a computational scientist, I spend a lot of time working on my macbook pro at the command line. I'm setting up a new laptop and it's time to rethink some of my setup.

It's always bothered me that the apple setup gives me a bunch of folders in my home directory that I don't want to see every time I'm cding around my file system (folders like Documents, Music, Pictures, Library, etc.) It's also inconvenient that whenever I do a find . -name [mymissingfile.jl] in my home directory that I get a bunch of errors when the find tries to look in Library but doesn't have permission.

At one point, I worked to remove or re-place these folders elsewhere but this hasn't worked out for me.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to get a cleaner setup? Without all these "extra" folders getting in the way?

One thought is just to place my "home" directory one directory deeper: instead of /Users/myname use something like /Users/me/myrealhome so that the vexing folders are in me but I'm always starting in myrealhome (by setting Terminal to open new shells there, by default). If I do that, can I change $HOME to be Users/me/myrealhome? So that cd ~ takes me where I want to go?

Any better ideas? Other thoughts?

Solution 1:

As you suggested I create other "functional" folders for development and do not try to disturb the MacOS architected folders like Documents, Downloads, ... because so many products depend on that layout. For me I am a developer and I created a ./Development folder and then put the various git repositories in there as well as tools. This let's me scope searches and other activities for scanning, etc.

Messing with the architected structure causes too much pain when installing other software.