> I have sidestepped the issue (in my mind) by putting all personal files in a `~/me` subdirectory, and create symlinks in `$HOME` to point to the relevant files in `$HOME/me`. It keeps things separate, and anything that's put inside an XDG folder that I want to hold onto can be migrated to ~/me and symlinked. I keep a short bash script that I use to (re)create the symlinks for me, as needed.
You or interested readers could use GNU stow to do that.
It's interesting, Stow is great if you're symlinking single locations to many symlinks, or merging directories, but I had a hard time generating stand-alone, relative symlinks in $HOME with stow that didn't also mess with things in other ways.
I use Stow myself to source music files from multiple root directories, it's a great piece of software that I simply could not wrangle to pull off what I was after.
Thanks for mentioning Stow, though; it doesn't get enough love and if you're smart with it, you can do some crazy things that, manually, would take hours or days.
You or interested readers could use GNU stow to do that.
https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/