Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On 2025-05-04, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 3 May 2025 13:52:51 +0200, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>

I also like the colon ":" in filenames. It runs havoc with Windows
users, though :-)

>
There is a convention among some network-aware *nix utilities to interpret
it as terminating a hostname prefix.
>
Using “∶” instead of “:” avoids this potential source of confusion.
>

I don't know if I've commented on this already, but:

This also introduces a problem where the character you propose requires
support to display. With ASCII, one can be reasonably confident that a
lot of interfaces will be able to display it. But that char (like the
curly quotes you use?) becomes an accessibility issue once the
information has to be displayed on, say, a latin1 terminal (or rather: a
terminal that can't do UCS).

Sure, some will prefer to develop only for utf8-capable interfaces and
obliviate compatibility, but it's still an issue to take into account.

That said YMMV, some will avoid the spaces for perhaps similar reasons
too (yes, that one is ASCII, but if a character breaks a workflow or
makes it more difficult, it doesn't matter that it's ASCII or even
ISO-646-compatible).

--
Nuno Silva
(I mean *terminal*, not terminal emulator.)