eadmund 5 days ago

Anything with a capital letter requires hitting two keys: Shift and then the desired letter. Thus /Programs requires 10 keystrokes rather than 9. Even worse, since the capital letter is at the beginning of the directory name, I have to type it and am unable to rely on tab-completion.

/Programs with its ten keystrokes is over twice the keystrokes of /bin and its four. Short names are quicker to type and require less effort. Given that to a first approximation I spend my entire life typing on a keyboard, I very much wish to optimise that experience.

  • Timwi 4 days ago

    That's really more the fault of the tab completion. There's no reason why it couldn't complete `prog` to `Programs`. It's just Unix tradition that they don't. I would prefer if they did.

    • fragmede 4 days ago

      In ~/.inputrc, add

          set completion-ignore-case on
      
      to enable case insensitive tab completion in bash.
      • Gracana 4 days ago

        Great tip! Apparently that's readline's config file, so this will affect a lot of things. That's great news for me; after switching to zsh I got used to case-insensitive tab completion, and now it annoys me when other tools don't work that way. This should help a lot.

  • oblio 4 days ago

    Your problem is solved by naming the thing /programs, instead. End of the world using full words, I tell ya!

jadamson 5 days ago

The first shell listing starts with `cd` and `ls`, the former being run in `~`. What does that weird `~` mean? Very strange.

More seriously, their file system is still case-sensitive, and inside /Programs they have `Iptables` and `Fontconfig`, naively capitalized, but also `OpenOffice` and `HTTPD`.

Not to mention that inside each program folder are `man` and `bin` as usual. I'm going to suggest the point of that article is structure and organization, not naming.

Nobody reasonable complains about a three-letter abbreviation you can type with one hand. For a path you're either accessing a lot or never at all, it makes complete sense.

codedokode 4 days ago

What's wrong with spaces? Macs support them since 80s. The only problem with spaces is caused by *nix, *nix shells, basically by Linux.

HumanOstrich 5 days ago

I think paths need to have emojis too in order to represent the emotional state of the person who created them in the year of our memelord 2025.