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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

#711
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having used a lot of all the formats, it's argue it's a lot easier to read an a tiny bit harder to type. For typing it's basically just an extra `-` because unless your alternative is nocase. For reading, CamelCase has 2 significant ambiguity issues: similarity between I and l, and what do you do with acronyms. Acronyms wouldn't actually be a problem if everybody just wrote them would in snake_case (i.e. only capital…

Adding an underscore everywhere is horrible! The spacebar is huge, and gets your thumbs basically to itself because space will be one of, if not the most commonly typed key. To replace that with one of the least ergonomic keys makes no sense.

And if CamelCase is so hard to read, why is it the norm for "high level languages"? Shouldn't those be optimized for ease of use?

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

#712

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

Seems like MS had the same idea according to an answer in the link: > Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.

[deleted]

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

#713
Not exactly spaces, but I have been bitten by something like this at my work quite recently. A Confluence page with special characters in the page title was working fine for a while. At some point there was a Confluence version update which made the page URL broken (and apparently unrecoverable, or at least not easily recoverable).

One way to look at it is that people of a certain generation eschew spaces because the tools of their formative years simply couldn't handle spaces - but another is that the olds have learned that generally erring on the side of KISS ("Keep it simple, stupid!") isn't a bad idea.

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

#714
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wherever you want. All of the above, or none. It really is up to you.

That's exactly the problem. This leads to mess. The Windows model of C:\Program Files\ is much better.

Except instead of config files, Windows has the registry.

Also, as mentioned by the siblings to thia comment, the 'mess' has a purpose, and is less messy than it appears.

Want to manually install something? Into /usr/local it goes. Done.

The only way to handle this that I've been really impressed with is Mac's "Applications" folder. Unfortunately, I dislike most other things about Mac.

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

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tab completion don’t work well for languages that require IME. That is one reason why I don’t.

IME == Input method editor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method

yup, I type in pronunciation and let it guess what I'm trying to say. Works okay in editors but don't work great with shells in a terminal emulator, so I just prefer not having to use it in shell operations.

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

#716

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

> Pro tip: rename your development directory I changed my username to not contain a space because it was too annoying to deal with all the random dev tools breaking. The worst offender was probably npx on Windows [1] (resolved after four years by deprecating npx), but it was far from the only one (though the JS ecosystem was somehow the worst in this regard of all languages I worked with). 1: https://github.com/zkat/…

Same, even I had to rename my user folder to not have a space because so many tools were breaking.

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

#717
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related too for CI: change the system time to be a time zone that is during your work hours in a different day already than UTC. Really helped getting failures earlier than 4pm PST.

Could you consider rephrasing this? It sounds like an interesting observation that I'd love to understand, but I'm genuinely not able to parse it. My best guess is "change the system time to be a timezone for which, during your work hours, the other-timezone is in a different day than UTC is" - but I'm still not sure what effect that would have on CI failures.

Maybe an example of the failure this detects helps: when I used to work on Rails apps in the olden days it was easy to call Time.now and get the local time instead of Time.zone.now to get UTC time. This often lead to wrong dates but tests would only fail once it was a new day in UTC land but still the old day in the local time zone. Making the CI machine's system time something Fiji time really helped in getting failures much sooner after changes were pushed.

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

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they did "User Files" instead of "Users" too, because so much software breaks on the home area having a space in it. Not least, it makes writing scripts for various shells and getting the quoting rules right an absolute pain as well...

They used to. The folder was called `Documents and Settings` until Win7.

In the Win95 era, it was "C:\My Documents".

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

#719

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…

Long option names are more descriptive, more easily distinguished, and easier to remember. Your shell should be intelligent enough to provide tab completion for option names, assuming it is configured to.

IMO, powershell got it right. Yeah, it’s syntax is strange, but it has standard flag usage with proper autocomplete, and you can shorten any flag the way you want (eg. fuzzy match) if it is unambiguous.
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