On my system I had way too much dotfiles:

% ls -d ~/.* | wc -l
421

For easier maintenance I wrote libetc. It is a LD_PRELOAD-able shared library that intercepts file operations: if a program tries to open a dotfile in $HOME, it is redirected to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (as defined by freedesktop).

You can then store all your config files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME instead of using zillions dotfiles in $HOME

If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined, the dotfiles are stored in $HOME/.config/

For more info read: README

2008-01-27: libetc-0.4.tar.gz (19417 bytes)
Added a blacklist of programs for which libetc should do nothing ($LIBETC_BLACKLIST)
Added a hack to make a symlink of ~/.Xauthority in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (CFLAGS=-DXAUTH_HACK make)
Code cleanup, bugfixes (thanks to Simon Lipp)
Switch to GPLv3

2007-01-31: libetc-0.3.tar.gz (13184 bytes)
Code cleanup, bugfixes

2006-08-10: libetc-0.2.tar.gz (13079 bytes)
Changes: intercept creat64, mkstemp and mkstemp64. So libetc now works fine with the Gimp and with fontconfig.
I'm using libetc on my desktops without too much problems.

2005-04-24: libetc-0.1.tar.gz (11444 bytes)