Years ago I started customizing my user-dirs.dirs, and have been reducing the directories in my home since.
Today, I keep the following user-dirs.dirs in my .dotfiles:
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/dl"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/docs"
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/"
Which gives me this sweet home layout:
[maiki@violet ~]$ tree . -L 1
.
├── dl
├── docs
└── music
And Nautilus uses the config as well:
