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

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

#31

Post by Dudeman112 »

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 could infer a lot about the second and what those params mean and what they do.

The first one is some magical incantation.

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

#33

Post by rob74 »

xdennis wrote: post #25

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.

Hmmm, I thought I was fluent in Romanian (born there and lived there for 26 years), but I only know 5 of those 8 words...

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

#34

Post by foxfluff »

martin-t wrote: post #21
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.

You state that as if that were objective.. but that's not my subjective experience at all. Somehow I have a hard time remembering these long names, (is it --conf or --config or --config-file or --config-path? -c would've done it for me. --set or --set-prop or --set-property or --prop or --property?), and I need to look them up in a man page anyway, and I make more typos typing them, and shell completion rarely works well if at all. I also find it harder to read and edit long lines that wrap.

Somehow these short letters stick much better for me, and the effort for finding them in the manual is the same, although in case of extra complexity as with xinput, it's even worse with the long names. I don't use either command often, but it's hard to forget xset m. The only thing I remember about xinput is that it's a horribly long lithany of things which I need to look up every time, and the syntax still feels weird.

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

#35

Post by Joker_vD »

sieve wrote: post #22

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.

I see that there are lots of comments about problems of TAB-completions with filenames with spaces in this comment section and I am frankly puzzled: both Bash and cmd.exe actually TAB-complete those perfectly fine, inserting quoting where it's needed.

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

#36

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

xdennis wrote: post #25

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.

So how did you deal with it in the 80s/90s?

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

#37

Post by wruza »

zibzab wrote: post #14

Why stop at spaces? An old prof of mine used to send emails where the subject line was always a valid identifier in C. Hello_dear_students_where_are_your_reports_

That identifier is clearly too long.

MISRA C:2004, 5.1 - Identifiers (internal and external) shall not rely on the significance of more than 31 character.

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

#38

Post by rob74 »

Well, you should still be afraid! Be very afraid! Seriously: only a few months ago I was confronted with a video encoding tool that didn't work properly when the file names contained spaces - so yes, even in 2021 it's still safer not to use spaces in file names...

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

#39

Post by masklinn »

xdennis wrote: post #25

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.

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

There is one big difference: CLI utilities don't usually care about diacritics (though encoding issues can throw a wrench in that), but they care a lot about spaces. So putting spaces in filenames requires properly quoting or escaping parameters, whereas diacritics does not. That makes one-off shell snippets and scripts a lot more annoying (though TBH I tend to shy away from those anyway, these days).

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

#40

Post by johnchristopher »

hirako2000 wrote: post #3

I never put spaces, and won't go over 32 characters, preferably less than than 16. even when sending a file to my grand mom. that's how deep rooted the trauma is. and yes, it remains an issue with some parsers and what not.

I still find files on the internet that my browser can't download because too many characters :(.

Edit: can't save, downloading works.

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