Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[David Lazaro <david lazaro eresmas net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 16:14, Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 17:02, David Lazaro wrote:
> > As you can see I'm talking in part from my experience and in part from
> > the hypothesis that Mac OS X and Windows got this feature in the default
> > set due to proper usability studies. I could be wrong, though.
> 
> Of course it is, but things are completely different on Windows (can't
> talk about OS X).

Same case for Mac OS X. Everything gets his extension. UNIX filesystem
is covered and unaffected. That is, you don't get to see /bin /usr et
al.

> First and foremost, every file has an extension, it's not optional. If
> you save a textfile as README.it, it will actually be saved as
> README.it.txt. Also extensions are always single and they are always
> used to determine the filetype, never to actually be an informative part
> of the name. That's why hiding them makes perfect sense in a DOS world,
> but to make this usefull in a Unix world, you would have to do the same,
> forcing file extensions on every file (also special cases like tar.gz
> would have to be taken care of) and I believe that's exactly the
> opposite of your intention. ;) 

You've read my mind ;) That is exactly my intention. And we are half
there, though. Almost all GNOME core apps slap the extension when saving
and filter on extension when opening files. GHex and Gedit are the only
exceptions to these rule that I can recall now.

Now I will shut up until more opinions are versed on the subject. After
all is difficult to be a one man army on this matter. ;)

Cheers,

David.