Just last year Mr.Valley convinced me to stop giving my files 8 character names. 
Ah. Thank you. I know what normal human beings call that, so I’m satisfied.
I’ve got the 8 character thing burned in my head.
Tabbed files in Word (or OpenOffice)
I WANT!!!
I loved tabbed browsing in Mozilla, why not have the concept in EVERY piece of software!
dos83fmt.rox ucnusitw.ith winfile.exe inanyvof.win
um… shouldn’t this rant be directed at MS Office (an application product), rather MS Windows (the OS that is hosting that app).
Yes, I know: same publisher. But I know several Win apps that handle Ridiculously Long File Names well, and more than several that do not.
If MS Word is buggy in this regard, it has plenty of company. Calling the entire OS to task for an app failure seems a bit overblown.
They do. That’s what the taskbar is for.
I’ve seen the identical behavior in other applications. Lotus 123 does it. So although some applications have been written so as to provide other nav tools for moving between open documents (windows), this system of ten only in a Windows menu followed by “More Windows…” and then an “Activate” window seems to be OS-wide. Certainly I would not think Lotus and Microsoft would have independently arrived at such a stupid klunky solution to a common everyday problem!
I think it’s more industry-wide than OS-wide. The list of windows in the menu is similar to the most recently used (MRU) file list. In the languages I program, Windows has no automatic facility for these - it’s pretty much left up to the programmer.
However, I am definitely in favor of a rant against Windows!
Yeah - as well as restricting character set used in filenames. Allowing things like spaces and punctuation marks commonly used for delimeters just makes things difficult for manipulation of file names by application code, having to apply various levels of escaping to hand the name off to some program via shell execution, store in a DB, construct lists of them, etc.
OTOH, we are well past the point in history where we are so worried about disk space that adding descriptive metainformation to filesystem entries to support friendlier display would be prohibitive.
If we were redesigning this stuff, files might have an internal name, a short name, and a longer description. The end user of an application would seldom see the internal name used by code to open the files unless they asked for it. Something like “word” would probably allow you to enter the short name / description, and would simply make up the real file name without showing it to you. The windows browser / file dialogs would probably show you the short names by default, while allowing you to see their real names if desired.
Of course, I’m implying a retrofit of all existing applications here, so it ain’t gonna happen.
And if you wanted to bite off on redesigning the world, you could get more ambitious, and allow file types to define all sorts of custom operations / annotations at the filesystem level.
Actually, several years ago, I interviewed with MS when they where working on the “Cairo” project, which included an “object file system” layer, which never materialized. What they had in mind was interesting, and probably impossible to pull off. Among other things, files were going to know how to do “merge” operations on themselves and resolve two separate sets of changes. I wouldn’t want to be the guy charged with implementing this feature for, say, video files.
Agreed. I try to refrain from commas, spaces, etc (believe it or not, Windows lets you use commas in filenames!) and just go with an underscore for a seperator. It seems ridiculous to allow list delimiters in filenames, then put RLNs in quotes when doing system functions on them.
As for the short internal flenames, Windows already does this. In addition to the LFN there’s a DOS 8.3 alias something like VOYAGE~1.JPG or INC3B0~1.TXT that older programs can use to access it.
On the Mac, I believe every file has a file name (limited to 32 characters under pre-OSX systems, limited to 256, I think, under OS X) and a hidden file ID. End users never see the file IDs and even geeks rarely have reason to do so. The OS uses it so that if some program is in the process of creating a file (e.g., midway through encoding an MP3 from a CD track) you can rename it or move it. Or so that you can rename a target file and have existing aliases still point to them, etc.
I assume MacOS 9 (and 8, etc) reference the file ID and then do some impromptu calculations to figure out how to display folders and files with overly long names. Files and folders created in MacOS X with >32 chars usually show up with about 25 chars’ worth of file name then a # followed by cat-walked-across-keyboard gobbledegook.
I know of several MacOS X programs that still won’t let you save files with long file names, but they don’t seem to have any program displaying the full name of and opening existing files that do.
You want me to pay through my nose to get Office XP so that I could get a bigger dropdown windows?
Oh boy.