Pre-exisiting / duplicate filename handling

[Milosz Derezynski <internalerror gmail com>]

Hello People,

it's very late for me here so please bear with me, I'll keep it short.

What if:

- FileChooser would handle duplicate filenames (when saving, see if a file with that name is present in the folder, and if it is, show a warning/info text in FileChooser itself), and allow for either overwriting the existing file, or appending a suffix (or, of course, let the user change the filename manually). Done this way, the chance of overwriting a file accidentally could be minimised by way of having the UI layout as well as its mechanics done in a way in which overwriting has to be explicitly confirmed by the user. Whether to keep the possible dialog asking for what to do could be debated, but most likely it is a good idea to keep that confirmation dialog after all.

- Since FC would handle this, we'd have uniformly suffixed files with originally the same name

This would also allow to configure desktop-wide filename handling i.e. set the default to never save with an identical name, or to always overwrite existing (I know, this sounds dangerous, just giving an example here; also: warning dialogs)

One thing that would not really work out at first is that a lot of apps already handle this by themselves by using suffixies, e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox, and many more. Those would need to code for the changed API and never check for a duplicate filename by themselves.

If someone thinks this is an idea worth trying out but feels too lazy, just tell me and I'll implement it myself to give it a spin.

Regards,

Milosz

--
Everything is Original Now