Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 11:55, David Lazaro wrote:
> > What do you think?
> 
> That you are right about this being slightly wasteful. What about hiding
> extensions (like everybody else, I must add)?

No, please not. ;)

Seriously, I thought about this but decided not to suggest it for
several reasons.
One of them was, that I remembered that I always disabled it in Windows
so if I would disable it, it would not solve the problem for me. :) Of
course it could be combined with another solution, but so much trouble
and coding and crack for what?
As someone already said, file extensions aren't really a Unix thing
anyway, we don't have silly .exe files for example. File extensions are
mostly informative. If you see a piece of paper icon, would you
immediately know weither that's a plaintext file or a word processor
file? File endings help to quickly gather information about the file,
but they aren't really required luckily. For example I could call my
textfile mynotes.bak just to remind my self that it's a backup. Not
because I have to. Cutting the ending wouldn't help at all, it would
just take this possibility away for me.
Oh and about the "extensions are a thing of the past" thing, I would
agree with that but that's exactly why we don't need to hide them. :) If
they aren't neccessarily used to determine the filetype anymore, there
is no reason to hide them as they are simply part of the name now. 

And I really think that just selecting the filename initially would
solve the problem quite nicely. It's less prone to bugs and errors and
nobody will shoot you for it. ;) 
Or does anyone disagree? If not, I will file a bugreport for it.

- Daniel