Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

81–90 of 817 posts

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

#81

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…

Cue nmcli (CLI for Gnome's NetworkManager) which uses UUIDs for everything and (at least a while ago) did not accept partial-but-unique UUIDs. Basically goes "nmcli connection up 5095665a-d82c-4ae6-8964-283623387941".

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

#82
Posix makefiles don't support spaces in dependency names. Not sure about gmake.

Cmake doesn't support semicolons, because everything in cmake is a string, and ; is the list item separator.

PATH is separated by colons, so you can't add directories containing : to it.

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

#83
post #38

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...

Not to mention most naively written bash scripts!

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

#84
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I seem to remember bash losing preferred escaping when TAB-completing, but can't reproduce it now with 5.0.17. Eg. you'd type `ls -l "Spaced [TAB]` and it would turn it into `ls -l Spaced\ Name`. I remember similar annoyances with other special shell characters (eg. single quotes, dollars, slashes), but that all seems to behave sane now.

I didn't even know this was a thing, but can't say I've ever preferred an escape style. I actually use backslashes a fair bit, usually just with spaces. I tend to reserve double quotes for variable or shell expansion, explicitly.

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

#85

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…

The problem is we're optimizing for "easy to learn" rather than "easy to use".

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The shell ought to be able to help with that. There's no need to remember if it's --conf or --config if you can press --conf.

One of the things I like about Fish is that by default it can tab-complete program options and also shows a one-line description of what each of them does. (It grabs that info from the man page).

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

#87
I am also that age, and kebab-case is the best case for filenames.

2021-01-01-some-important-document.pdf gives me the warm fuzzies. On the off chance that some more differentiation is needed, throw in an underscore and a whole new world opens up

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

#88
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

camelCase is objectively harder to read than snake_case or kebab-case, though familiarity can mitigate that.

I'd argue it's at most a tiny bit harder to read, and a lot easier to type. On balance I'd rather avoid making a pinky key one of the keys I have to use the most.

"On balance I'd rather avoid making a pinky key one of the keys I have to use the most."

And you use something else than your pinky finger for the shift key specifically when typing capitalized letters for camelCase?

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

#89

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…

Cue nmcli (CLI for Gnome's NetworkManager) which uses UUIDs for everything and (at least a while ago) did not accept partial-but-unique UUIDs. Basically goes "nmcli connection up 5095665a-d82c-4ae6-8964-283623387941".

By this point, I'm pretty sure there are people at gnome who compete to see who will make the stupidest suggestion that gets put in production.

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

#90
Somehow the OneDrive clients still refuse to allow leading or trailing spaces in the filenames, along with a few other characters that are not allowed - seems to cause quite a bit of user friction at least with the non-tech guys that I work with who are confused about why OneDrive is one of the few file syncing clients that has these requirements....
Post reply on HN