[codedokode]

What are the advantages of using a case-sensitive file system? I cannot imagine a situation when you need to create two files that differ only in letter case. This also would make program that create such files not portable.

[hvdijk]

The primary advantage for me is simplicity. Case insensitive file systems are complicated when you start dealing with non-ASCII characters and different software implementing the case rules with subtle differences. With case sensitive file systems you know exactly what you get.

[jodrellblank]

If you're going to move to non-ASCII characters, what about Unicode combining characters, do you have to care if your file named é is a single accented e or a pair of e-and-combining-accent before you can move it?

If you shouldn't have to care, if there should be a layer of Unicode normalization happening, why is that okay but case normalisation is not okay? If you do have to care, then you no longer "know exactly what you get".

[hvdijk]

> If you do have to care, then you no longer "know exactly what you get".

You do know you get exactly what you put in, whether that is é (U+00E9) or é (U+0065 U+0301). When you reference files created by yourself, this is not a problem as realistically speaking, your input method will only have a convenient way of forming one of these, and it will consistently generate the same one every time. When you reference files created by someone else, this may be a problem but no more than e.g. the distinction between file.txt (lowercase L) and fiIe.txt (uppercase i): from the user's perspective, the problem is pretty much avoided by selecting the file using tab completion, TUIs, GUIs, whatever you use.

[bayindirh]

> e.g. the distinction between file.txt (lowercase L) and fiIe.txt (uppercase i)...

Just want to remind a little but extremely important thing: There's absolutely no guarantees that upper("i") is I. There's at least one language breaks that convention, and you won't believe how a big headache is that.

[hvdijk]

Good point, Turkish uppercases i to İ. This adds complexity to the idea of case insensitive file systems even when only considering ASCII.

[jodrellblank]

https://prnt.sc/257kxxa lowercase l and uppercase I are quite distinct. If you're going to select all your filenames with autocomplete, then why argue restrict me to case sensitive filenames?

Windows NTFS is sometimes described as case-preserving, case-insensitive; i.e. if you name a file "Test" it will stay in that case, but if you ask for "test" it will find the file "Test". I don't know whether that happens in Win32 or NTFS, but it seems like best of both worlds; I don't want "case insensitive" where it could show me the name in a different case than I entered.

[hvdijk]

For the record, this is how lowercase l and uppercase I show up here: https://prnt.sc/258zzy0

[jodrellblank]

And this is how they show up here: https://prnt.sc/259t3qy

I don't override the font, either HN or FireFox or Windows is picking a serif font. I assume you didn't explicitly choose a font where different things look the same, but if it rendered 'a' and 'Z' the same glyph, you wouldn't say that was a problem with the English alphabet or with case sensitivity, or anything other than bad font design, right?

[jodrellblank]

Frankly, the use case where I make a file to send to a customer "Example Ltd DNS details" and want to open it from a command line happens to me infinitely more often than the use case where I have a file called "fiIe.txt" and want to open it from a command line.

[naniwaduni]

Well, it means you don't need to do things with Unicode casefolding tables in the middle of your not-eating-data fs code.