Re: [Nautilus-list] Anonymous files

[Jonas De Vuyst <jonas devuyst advalvas be>]

> At first glance, the idea seems OK, albeit not compelling, to me.
> 
> One strike against it is that having yet another special rule that's known 
> only to tools that are "in the know" could be another opportunity to have 
> a system look like it's ragged, as tools that don't know the files are 
> anonymous keep showing file names for them.

Yes. I chose not to use .~ or something because the files should be
accessible from all programs (though it would be a pain for programs that
don't show a preview). Of course it would be nice if KDE supported the same
feature.

> This part of the proposal is not so good. Shells already use a leading ~ 
> character to mean "home directory". So "~darin" means "darin's home 
> directory", although "./~darin" does mean "a file named ~darin". Also, I 
> don't agree that the ~ suffix means that ~ is "already a special character"
>   and available for reserved use. If I was designing this feature, I would 
> name anonymous files something that's clear to someone who sees the file 
> name, perhaps "anonymous-file-<xxx>".

The chance that a user actually tries to make a file with the anonymous-file
prefix is much bigger than the chance that someone makes a file beginning with
~ I think. Say if I were to write text about anonymous files and wanted to
store it as anonymous-file-summary.txt, I wouldn't see the filename for no
good reason.

Also ~ is used for quite a lot of special cases:
1/ ~, ~jdv: fast way for accessing home directories in the shell.
2/ somefile~: backups.
3/ progra~1: for short names on Windows systems.
These three points, to me, are a good reason to advice people not to use the ~
character in filenames.

One last advantage of ~ over anonymous-file- would be that ~ almost certainly
makes the files list last when using the shell, something that would be useful
I think.

- Jonas.