Oh, I realize why it is, I just don’t see it as an advantage, the whole argument is just a technical one, not a usabillity one.

You’re basically arguing that a system shouldn’t support user friendly things because that would add significant burden to the programmer.

The quintessential linux philosophy. Well done! I mean, what is language? Why have named code variables? This is just a random array of bytes!

pov: you encode filenames in utf-1, just happens to contain one of those bytes

If you rename a file only changing the casing it doesn’t update properly, you need to rename it to something else and back. This is so userfriendly I have been stumped by it multiple times.

To my great surprise, this has been fixed. I don’t know when, but I tried it on my Windows 10 VM and it just worked. Only took them 20 years or so :)

Just checked on my work box - if you go into Disk Utility and start the process to add a volume, the default selection is APFS, and there’s an option in the dropdown for for APFS (Case-sensitive)

Gotta go count my files again… oh yeah it’s PROJE~14.BAS

Can it rename it then? What happens if cd into a folder from cmd with same name?

The thing is, a lot of the legacy backwards compatible stuff that’s in Linux is because a lot of things in Unix were actually pretty well thought out from the get go, unlike many of the ugly hacks that went into MSDOS and later Windows and overstayed their welcome.

Things like: long case sensitive file names from the beginning instead of forced uppercase 8.3 , a hierarchical filesystem instead of drive letters, “everything is a file” concept, a notion of multiple users and permissions, pre-emptive multitasking, proper virtual memory management instead of a “640k is enough” + XMS + EMS, and so on.

That’s why you never ever write the filename manually. Always copy paste it!

Nope. Tried that. Tried DIR in a command window too. But I never specified even what version of Windows I was running, so I’m a little unclear why you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem I was experiencing on windows nearly a decade ago. I guess this is what be mansplained too feels like.

I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.

Isn’t it less strain on the Filesystem? keeping a sanitised filename next to the actual filename surely has some drawbacks.

For example I might store blobs of data processed by my database in files that have the Base64 ID of the blob as the filename. If the filesystem was case insensitive, I’d be getting collisions.

Users probably don’t make such files, no. But 99% of files on a computer weren’t created by the user, but are part of some software, where it may matter.

And often software originally written for Linux or macOS and then ported to Windows ends up having problems due to this.

Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that’s the point of case insensitive names, it doesn’t matter. However you want to call them will work.

sounds like actually a good solution … tho doesnt sound like it would work for more than 2 similarly-named files

URLs aren’t case-sensitive though, so wouldn’t those necessarily have another kind of differentiator?

hence the inclusion of the case insensitive auto completion, it’s not 1982, you can use that now.

either or, whatever the fuck you want really.

You can just not use capital letters if you feel like it. Works pretty well. Or just use a case insensitive shell handler for pretending it’s not actually cased at all.

Hell im pretty sure you could just render all of the text in a certain case and call it a day lol.

:D.

Fixed

Yeah, Linux can capture and playback the spoken distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters. Windows can’t do that.

You’re not taking advantage of that functionality?

I would argue that elegance and being easy to program are virtues by themselves, because it makes code easy to understand and easy to maintain.

A one-to-one string to filename mapping is straightforward and elegant. It’s easy to understand (“a filename is a unique string of characters”), it makes file name comparisons easy (a bit level compare suffices) and as long as you consistently use the case that you intend, it doesn’t behave unexpectedly. It really is the way of the least surprise.

After all, case often does have meaning, so why shouldn’t it be treated as a meaningful part of a filename? For example: “French fries.jpg” could contain a picture of fries specifically made in France, whereas “french fries.jpg” could contain a picture of fries made anywhere. Or “November rain.mp3” could be the sound of rain falling in the month of November, whereas “November Rain.mp3” is a Guns N’ Roses song. All silly examples of course, but they’re merely to demonstrate that capitalization does have meaning, and so we should be able to express that canonically in filenames as well.

Because it’s designed for average people

It is not. It is designed for all purposes, automated processes and people alike. A filesystem is not just for grandma’s Word documents.

And even people’s names are case sensitive. My name has the format Aaa Bbb ccc Ddd. It is not the same as the person with the name Aaa Bbb Ccc Ddd, who also exists. So why shouldn’t file names be?

That’s some suckless level cope

Thanks, really constructive way of arguing your point…

Who really cares about some programming purity aspect?

People who create operating systems and file systems, or programs that interface with those should, because behind every computing aspect is still a physical reality of how that data is structured and stored.

What’s correct is the way that creates the least friction for the end users

Treating different characters as different characters is objectively the most correct and predictable way. Case has meaning, both in natural language as well as in almost anything computer related, so users should be allowed to express case canonically in filenames as well. If you were never exposed to a case insensitive filesystem first, you would find case sensitive the most natural way. Give end users some credit, it’s really not rocket science to understand that f and F are not the same, most people handle this “mindblowing” concept just fine.

Also the reason Microsoft made NTFS case insensitive by default was not because of “user friction” but because of backwards compatibility with MSDOS FAT16 all upper case 8.3 file names. However, when they created a new file system for the cloud, Azure Blob Storage, guess what: they made it case sensitive.