But do I type ‘ImportantFile’, or ‘importantfile’?
As I understand it, if I searched for either of these strings in a case sensitive file system, I would not find a file called ‘IMPORTANTFILE’.
At best, a case sensitive file system makes naming conventions more complex. At worst , it obfuscates files. I just can’t imagine a scenario where it would be helpful. Do you really see a need to have a file called ‘aaaAaa’ and a totally separate one called ‘aaAaaa’?
The search string is case insensitive. The file name isnt.
So you will find all of them.
But then you are not getting rid of the complexity, you are just forcing programs to become more complex/inefficient.
I experienced this with the doom libretro core, which is meant to be portable and have minimal dependencies… so if I need it to automatically find DOOM.WAD/ doom.wad/Doom.WAD/etc in a directory I would either have to add a globbing library as dependency to handle this case and have it fetch [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd], manually check for each possible case, or list the entire directory (I hope you don’t have a library of a million wads!) and compare each file (after upper/lower) just to find the one with the right name. And that could be a real pain for embedded devices with low I/O or if there’s a remote storage layer behind.
I think we are looking at this from different angles. I think you are looking at the programmer perspective, and i am looking at the end-user perspective, who uses a GUI file explorer.
In the case of a GUI file explorer the search handles the case insensitivity. So for me using Dolphin in KDE if i have two files:
TEST.txt and test.txt, if i type “tes” on my keyboard, i will be given the uppercase one first. if i type “te” again, it jumps to the next fitting entry, which is test.txt. If i put “test” or “TEST” in the search bar, i will get back both results.
I see why a strictly case insensitive file system makes it easier for programmers down the line to not have to handle the different cases explicitly in their program anymore.
