John GruberSep 19, 2024
Who am I to question the file name extension for this? Wait…
Show threadNick RadcliffeSep 19, 2024

@gruber Of all the old-school Mac user hang-ups, I find the hatred of file extensions (e.g. @siracusa) and insistence on using unconventional extensions the strangest. And I say this as someone who refused to use Obsidian for too long because it insists on .md as the extension. (But unlike @gruber, I wasn’t holding out for .markdown or .text. I use .txt for text files, like Ken and Dennis and nearly everyone else.)

I find file extensions super useful, particularly for keeping different formats or varieties of related files—raw files and .jpegs, .c files and .o files, .tex source files and the other 24 related files.

$ ls -1 tddabook.*
tddabook.4ct
tddabook.4tc
tddabook.aux
tddabook.bbl
tddabook.bcf
tddabook.bib
tddabook.blg
tddabook.idv
tddabook.idx
tddabook.ilg
tddabook.ind
tddabook.lg
tddabook.log
tddabook.out
tddabook.pdf
tddabook.run.xml
tddabook.tex
tddabook.tmp
tddabook.toc
tddabook.xref

And don’t even get me started on spaces in filenames…

Show threadJohn GruberSep 19, 2024
@njr @siracusa It's like you're choosing to live in 1983.
Show threadNick RadcliffeSep 19, 2024
@gruber @siracusa Or 1970:01:01T00:00:00
Show threadJohn GruberSep 19, 2024
@njr @siracusa You joke, but my go-to argument against file name extensions is why not put creation and modified datetimes in the filename too?
Show threadNick Radcliffe

@gruber @siracusa OK. But I don’t find that compelling, because this doesn’t seem at all like a slippery slope. Have you ever heard anyone advocate those? Do you believe there’s pent-up demand among extensionphiles for ever more metadata in the filename?

If I suggested that the logical end-point of your position is to get rid of the file name and just used i-node numbers and images of the head of the file you’d say I was making a straw man argument. But I think it’s a rough inverse of your argument.

FWIW, the closest I can think of to a demand for more metadata in filenames is version numbers/backup extensions, like VMS used to use and things like ~ and .bak additions to filenames. And I don’t love those. (And the Mac does it anyway; it just uses ‘ copy’ in the file *stem*. It’s almost like if file extensions didn’t exist we’d have to invent them.)

Sep 19, 2024 at 10:41amWeb
Show threadManicDeeSep 22, 2024

@njr @gruber @siracusa I put the date in the file name when the date is an important part of that file’s identification.

Bank Name — Savings Account — YYYY-MM-DD

That date is the issue date of the statement, not the creation date of the file. These files are PDF typically delivered to me as <random characters>.pdf

Bank and account are metadata too. Now lexical sorting works to separate savings from mortgage or billing without splitting into folders.