I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
Set XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path> in your environment and most tools follow it
I have, unfortunatly a lot of programs dont.