Good for him. I hate case-sensitivity, and it’s what keeps me going back to DOS & Windows. FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times.
Remember that 99% of the time that’s gonna be because of a typo for 99% users. They won’t have File.txt, FILE.TXT and FiLe.tXt, they’ll have ReportMay.docx and REportMay.docx or whatever.
And yeah, that includes me. I don’t want case-sensitivity for that reason alone. Thanks, but no thanks.
Do you actually have a case sensitive filesystem? Because in reality I don’t even notice it when doing normal work. It seems like such a weird thing to be crying about.
I did, because they’re different ways of expressing the same meaning. They all mean (apologies for borrowing mathematical notation for linguistic applications) |file|. I don’t care what the expression of a thing is, I care about meaning. And as a result, when I save a file and then search to recall it, it should not matter what case it’s in - only for the meaning to match. The state of my shift or capslock should be totally immaterial.
Then why should it allow me to save different expressions of the same meaning ever? If it’s going to let me search for it case-insensitive, just head the matter off at the pass and save it that way. Either that, or automatically create link files for every case permutation to the same folder as soon as the file exists.
This is really a problem of human vs computer thinking.
F and f are two different characters, encoded differently. Ergo, File and file are different by raw bytes.
Some developers wish to make the interactions for the user more consistent and thus a case-insensitive filesystem is born. The problem is that this is such a low level place to make this decision.
A filesystem, as in the kernel level interactions for files, should be case-sensitive in that every character is a unique series of bits. But there’s nothing stopping a higher level api from helping users out. It would be sensible to have a case-insensitive desktop environment.
The low level functionality should remain intentional though.
I was looking into this recently and I didn’t know this but NTFS is actually designed by competent people and is fully case sensitive.
For backwards of course Microsoft had to make the file APIs case insensitive, but the actual filesystem is case sensitive.
Also, presumably because this is a real turn-off for developers there is actually an option in Windows to sort of make specific directories case sensitive. Wild right?
Yeah, I think Windows actually handles it quite well, the actual filesystem has no notion of what the filenames are outside of basic “It’s UTF-16”, it’s the OS filesystem layer that handles all the quirks.
Because that’s what people seem to dismiss, there’s no one standard notion of case folding. It depends on the locale you’re using, and that shouldn’t be built into the FS itself. The classic one was the German “long S”, where “SS” should be case folded with “ß”, except they changed it in 2024 so now they shouldn’t match (“ß” becomes “ẞ” now), good luck updating your FS to support rules like that.
Now your shell? That’s easy, you can just warn the user that a “matching” filename already exists and prompt them to change it, and you can vary those warnings based on the locale, and you can push out updates as easily as any other patch.
Good for him. I hate case-sensitivity, and it’s what keeps me going back to DOS & Windows. FILE, File, file, and FilE should all be the same thing at all times.
If these were truly the same thing, you should have not written them differently.
But you did.
Remember that 99% of the time that’s gonna be because of a typo for 99% users. They won’t have
File.txt,FILE.TXTandFiLe.tXt, they’ll haveReportMay.docxandREportMay.docxor whatever.And yeah, that includes me. I don’t want case-sensitivity for that reason alone. Thanks, but no thanks.
Do you actually have a case sensitive filesystem? Because in reality I don’t even notice it when doing normal work. It seems like such a weird thing to be crying about.
I’ve used Linux, yes. And I’m not “crying” I just find it annoying. Good grief.
I did, because they’re different ways of expressing the same meaning. They all mean (apologies for borrowing mathematical notation for linguistic applications) |file|. I don’t care what the expression of a thing is, I care about meaning. And as a result, when I save a file and then search to recall it, it should not matter what case it’s in - only for the meaning to match. The state of my shift or capslock should be totally immaterial.
Whatever you use to search can just be case insensitive, which is how most file browsers work on Linux.
Then why should it allow me to save different expressions of the same meaning ever? If it’s going to let me search for it case-insensitive, just head the matter off at the pass and save it that way. Either that, or automatically create link files for every case permutation to the same folder as soon as the file exists.
This is really a problem of human vs computer thinking.
F and f are two different characters, encoded differently. Ergo, File and file are different by raw bytes.
Some developers wish to make the interactions for the user more consistent and thus a case-insensitive filesystem is born. The problem is that this is such a low level place to make this decision.
A filesystem, as in the kernel level interactions for files, should be case-sensitive in that every character is a unique series of bits. But there’s nothing stopping a higher level api from helping users out. It would be sensible to have a case-insensitive desktop environment.
The low level functionality should remain intentional though.
I was looking into this recently and I didn’t know this but NTFS is actually designed by competent people and is fully case sensitive.
For backwards of course Microsoft had to make the file APIs case insensitive, but the actual filesystem is case sensitive.
Also, presumably because this is a real turn-off for developers there is actually an option in Windows to sort of make specific directories case sensitive. Wild right?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity
Yeah, I think Windows actually handles it quite well, the actual filesystem has no notion of what the filenames are outside of basic “It’s UTF-16”, it’s the OS filesystem layer that handles all the quirks.
Because that’s what people seem to dismiss, there’s no one standard notion of case folding. It depends on the locale you’re using, and that shouldn’t be built into the FS itself. The classic one was the German “long S”, where “SS” should be case folded with “ß”, except they changed it in 2024 so now they shouldn’t match (“ß” becomes “ẞ” now), good luck updating your FS to support rules like that.
Now your shell? That’s easy, you can just warn the user that a “matching” filename already exists and prompt them to change it, and you can vary those warnings based on the locale, and you can push out updates as easily as any other patch.
Ah, one more reason for me to despise NTFS.
Why? They did it right…
“Let’s point many completely different combinations of characters at the same file”
sentences dreamed up by the utterly deranged /hj /lh
Couldn’t agree more. I literally can not think of a single scenario where case sensitive file names would be anything but an annoyance.
somehow you remInded me of the BIG-small archItecture.
BlG-small?
smig ball