Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 817 posts

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#21

Post by martin-t »

foxfluff wrote: post #17

I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…

I find this attitude misguided. More descriptive names are more ergonomic for things you only use rarely but they need to be combined with much better autocompletion than most shells provide by default.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#22

Post by sieve »

This is a UI/UX problem that I only face when dealing with shells and shell scripts. Never had any issues when spawning processes from within languages/runtimes that support sane argument arrays.

sh, bash and cmd.exe are shit. The shell needs serious rethinking.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#23

Post by necovek »

glandium wrote: post #12

Spaces in file names are a nightmare in Makefiles.

Not if you are careful (a bit like "$@" vs $@ in shell scripts).

Edit: replace $@ with quoted version which actually changes the behavior (I was wrong that the difference is between $* and $@).

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#24

Post by skohan »

foxfluff wrote: post #17

I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…

What's wrong with camelCase? It's easier to type than snake

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#25

Post by xdennis »

Looks like I'm in the minority. I always use spaces and non-ASCII characters in filenames.

In many languages it's a requirement. For example, in Romanian, there are 8 words that collide with „fata“ if you remove the diacritics (fata, fată, fața, față, făta, făță, fâța, fâță).

Given that we have to use diacritics, spaces don't seem like a big deal.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#26

Post by Joker_vD »

One of the main reasons why Windows used "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" was to force the programs (and programmers) to deal with paths with spaces. And you know, for the most part it kinda, more or less worked out although of course even today you will find programs that ask you to install them in a folder without spaces in the path.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#27

Post by koziserek »

vbg wrote: post #20
vbg wrote: post #19

Spaces in file names are a bad idea because spaces delimit the name of separate distinct files, At least in my crazy old illogical head anyway.

File names should be long enough to clearly communicate meaning/purpose/context, no more no less.

.doc

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#29

Post by Rerarom »

Joker_vD wrote: post #26

One of the main reasons why Windows used "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" was to force the programs (and programmers) to deal with paths with spaces. And you know, for the most part it kinda, more or less worked out although of course even today you will find programs that ask you to install them in a folder without spaces in the path.

VFAT and stuff like that actually provided alternate names like PROGRA~1

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#30

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

skohan wrote: post #24
foxfluff wrote: post #17

I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…

What's wrong with camelCase? It's easier to type than snake

There's a tendency away from snake_case and towards kebab-case in things you interact with via CLI. Even moreso towards nocase.

Programs like Powershell eschew ease of use in CLI for readability in scripts.

Post reply on HN