I'm sharing the article out of pain as I try to add only the relevant files from ~/.config into version control. Many programs partially implement the XDG Base Directory spec by using ~/.config. But then some also dump data, cache, state, logs, and other non-configuration material into the same place. [1] The article above summarizes how XDG offers four different places:

    - Cache $HOME/.cache
    - Configuration $HOME/.config
    - Data $HOME/.local/share
    - State $HOME/.local/state

[1]: This is why we can't have nice things!