.DS_Store

Super cool, I realized I was thinking of the wargame A Few Acres Of Snow by martin wallace (the designer of the modern classics, Brass Birmingham and Brass Lancashire)

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/79828/a-few-acres-of-snow

What’s a windows?

Yes, so annoying especially when using source control which is case sensitive.

Rename Hello hello2

Commit

Rename hello2 hello

Commit

Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn't make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).

And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren't actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.

'A' != 'a', they are just as unequal as 'a' and 'b'

Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers' intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.

On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.

Think the other way around: What's the use case for case insensitive file names? Does it justify the effort and complexity for the filesystem and the programs to know the difference between lower and upper space chars?

Because I want to?

Suffering

FWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn't provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)

A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.

today I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine...

the macos file browser, Finder, lets you set a background for a folder, move file icons around to arbitrary positions, other shenanigans. in order for this to work across systems on removable storage media and network mounts, they have this.

Iirc they're indexes for the system wide search feature, Spotlight

I hope they didn’t close their account two years ago!

Metadata that's a holdover from the 1980s MacOS behavior. Hilariously, today, NTFS supports that metadata better than Apple's own filesystems of today. They can hide it in Alternate Data Streams.

ehthumbs_vista.db

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-disable-windows-thumbs-db-files-from-being-created this kills that.

Ah shit I've forgotten the ancient tablets, ill fix that thank you!

I agree. It somehow seems very unfinished, and it annoyed me more than I'd like

Adieux!

It's for local service discovery. Those services may be printers on your network, or another computer sharing music on iTunes (which is why as a Windows user you'd usually get Bonjour when installing iTunes). Or maybe it's your Raspberry Pi.

It feels iffy because it comes bundled with other software without you being asked (IIRC) and it autoruns on startup. And I mean 20 years ago when iPods were a thing and people had to use iTunes on Windows, a couple dozen megabytes of RAM really mattered too. Hell I had 512 MB back when I had an iPod (and therefore iTunes)

All i figured out for certain is that it came bundled with itunes.

Probably not. I know better then to trust the french /s

Why is there a * in front of DS_Store?
Seems like fastly made a small mistake find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -print -delete would just match the exact file and is faster.

Not for buying new DSiware games?

It's not, but I still prefer not pushing my config on others, or others pushing theirs on me.

You probably already know this, but for those who don’t, git can globally ignore patterns. It’s the first thing I set up after logging in. Honestly wish git just shipped this way out of the box (maybe match .DS_Store by name and some magic bytes?) with a way to disable it. Just for the sake of easier onboarding

I personally strongly advise against committing IDE junk to version control. Assuming your IDE workspace defaults are "sane" for the rest of the contributors is not a good practice.

.vscode doesn't store cache or any trash like that, so if you're including all settings, tasks, etc, you can probably just include everything.

The only thing to keep in mind is to only add settings, extension recommendations, etc that apply to all your collaborators and aren't just personal preferences. A few good examples are formatting rules, task definitions to run the project, and linting rules that can't be defined somewhere else.

Stop ruining my joke.

And emulation is legal too, but that doesn't stop Nintendo.

This is probably not a relevant counter point, just a(n un)fun fact, but Nintendo put in a patent for throwing a capture ball at monsters after Pal World was released and Pal World has to change some stuff (though I'm not sure if they're doing it to avoid going to court because they're concerned or if they're being compelled).

It's only really Windows that doesn't use LF these days. All the Unix-based ones (Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, Android etc.) use LF...

Also applies to Mac but yeah

That doesn't work, DS_Store are files not directories ( you need to use -type f).
An equivalent find command would be:
find "$HOME" -type f -name '.DS_Store' -delete -print
find takes a while; fd is way, way faster, but find is preinstalled, so there is that.