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.
@dan
Oh also I think ~/.config is used primarily for configuration files that are not intended to be edited with a text editor. Many apps (e.g. Firefox) just use ~/.firefox or something similar rather than ~/.config and app specific dot directories actually makes more sense to me for GUI driven per-user configurations.