Don't Pollute User Space

I do not agree at all; for personalisation it is necessary for a place. And I still have a chance to create a ‘home’ directory inside

\Documents and Settings\User\

and use a shortcut for it.

Actually, I am annoyed by folder structure. Assume that I have an album of my photographs and I want to organise them in folders. For example, I want to put some photos into ‘My Family’ folder and also want to put some photos into ‘Vacation’ folder.

So, what should I do if I had a vacation with my family?

I was expecting a tagging system for files, however developers of Micros~1 still insisting on using folder based organisation.

The problem I have with this discussion, is from a user’s backup perspective. Me personally, I want to just backup the My Documents folder, and know that I’ve got all my personal files covered, this includes things like saved games and letters etc. I can’t just back up the app data folder, for two reasons:

  1. In many cases it’s useless. On several ocassions when I’ve copied the entire user profile folder to a new machine, first of all I get random permission errors, and secondly some applications don’t work properly. So it’s a waste of time.
  2. For some unknown reason, the app data folder contains the default temp data folder. This is typically 500MB+ and contains stuff that shouldn’t be there, and is a waste of space and backup time.

Every app creates it’s own subfolder and stores files there - all without asking. But i don’t want to store files sorting them by their extension or creator program - i want to file them “object oriented”:
For every project i’ll create an own folder, which contains files of all different types. Storing a music file under “my music” and the associated jpeg-files under “my pictures” is wrong, if they are used together to form an video - which will be stored under “my videos” by default. They all belong to one folder for this project. The folder “my pictures” could be an automatic view, which aggregates all jpegs virtually, as seen in newer outlook-versions.
In Outlook virtual mail-folders are used, why not in the OS Vista?

Perros: you’re missing several points here:

  1. As you said, it’s the accepted convention. Which means there is one, and it’s respected.
  2. Those are files hidden. Most file managers, as well as the ls command, don’t display them unless asked. And even if you choose to see them, they’re nicely grouped at one end of the list, thanks to the naming convention (notice how they all start with a dot?)

Would be nice if they at least had a different icon for empty folders (a transparent folder?)… I’ve started using iColorFolder, and this has let me grey out useless folders and highlight interesting ones, makes it a lot quicker to use explorerer.

Another thought: In today’s time, every application should be viewed as potentially hostile. But in the process of installation, the setup could create folders and files in nearly all places over the system. Ok, in vista the system-folder is tabu now.
How would it be if an application could store files at just two predefined folders:
programs\app_xyz
and
userdata\app_xyz
(where app_xyz is defined by the OS)

The OS should throw a warning box if any other place is corrupted with files or folders. If the program is used, and the user wants to store the newly created data, only the folder or filename choosen by him in an standard-dialog may be used by the application.
The OS should take care, that no other destinations could by used be the application. This behaviour could be made transparent to the application. It’s a sort of virtual-machine, but without the overhead.

Web-Applications are sort of that, but privacy with such apps is a big concern for me there. No installation needed, but i have to trust the offeror.

  1. “Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly”
  2. Granted, Apple is cheating quite a bit by inheriting the well-worn conventions of classic Unix operating systems.

No. You even said it yourself.

Didn’t bother checking for dupes, but I hate how the Unix tree is typically set up. I want / to only contain a few folders, say, /usr and /sys maybe. and /usr/MYNAME/home should be mine, and should be pointed to by ~ while all my stupid .files belong in /usr/MYNAME/

To all the guys that said linux unix isn’t much better than that, I would say you guys are fucktard…

Well, I need to explain a little bit.

so guys are saying that .document .vim .bash … shouldnt be inside the home directory of the users?

First, the home directory isn’t the “Document” directory
Second, While the Home directory != MyDocument whatever it is great and it should stay like that… why?

Because in english it is MyDocuments…in french MesDocuments and so on for any language you use.

So to the guy who proposed putting these files inside the ~/conf
i would say it won’t happen anytime soon because conf could change depending on the language. Like my Desktop folder isn’t named desktop but Bureau.

So why it is great to put every .configuration file/document inside the root of your home…
It isn’t language dependent. The document cannot be deleted by accident deleting every configuration file in one shot.

And for developpers, creating a folder inside ~is less typing than
~/${configuration_folder}/

just put it on the root of your home directory.
Then i would say that software never putted thing inside my Document directory. Because my home folder is my home folder not my document directory…Understood?

and i would add something else…
Where is located the My Document Directory inside windows xp?
Any Guess…

document and settings\user\my document… OH
so the home folder inside windows isn’t my document directory.
Oh same thing in linux…home folder isn’t MyDocument directory.

If someone put up the idea to put files inside
~/etc
~/bin
~/lib
~/share

i would say why not…because it keep the skeleton of unix folder.
While i don’t think it is necessary. May be one day

Yeah ! The removed the "my " prefix to folders in vista’s user space ? Good riddance. :slight_smile:

As for programmers using folders as they please, I second your opinion, but don’t know if the situation is going to change anytime soon.

I believe that a lot of “windows problems” are caused by “bad programs”, who do whatever they please. Maybe Windows should be stricter, killing apps that misbehave ? But that would cause a lot of old apps not to run anymore, and a lot of confused users … :expressionless:

Well then, they’re doomed.

  1. Those are files hidden. Most file managers, as well as the ls command, don’t display them unless asked. And even if you choose to see them, they’re nicely grouped at one end of the list, thanks to the naming convention (notice how they all start with a dot?)

That’s right, but if you work with Windows you have to show hidden files, otherwise you cannot access important stuff.

I can completely see this perspective. In the Unix namespace; a user’s home is separated from the system although a system user can do anything. As a rule, Unix folks tend to do things based on who you are and where you are at (which Peter Seller’s taught us all is the key to success) - however - some software exists that interferes with the user experience and such software is a recent thing.

I do not want to name any software in particular, so instead I will say software that can start userland server processes (feel free to fill in one) that not only does not help the user but often clashes with what other users might be doing.

Point being - Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) are not the only ones who do not get this concept of leave the user alone as much as you can.

Thanks Jeff,
Jay

In case my last post wasn’t clear: it’s that precise attitude of saying that someone is doing something right but that it doesn’t matter anyways because they didn’t invent it that got Microsoft in the horse shit that it is in right now. Who knows, maybe it has to do with Patents. But no, it actually doesn’t and we all know it doesn’t…

Whether Apple ‘cheated’ or not is so moot, I can’t even think of a superlative or expletive to qualify it. Justification has no room in the argument of being Wrong versus being Right. This is why after 15 years of professional windows programming and usage, I’ve just completely jumped over to OS X and haven’t looked back since. Justification? It’s Right™.
I even pay the $129 to buy OS X legally. Something which I’ve stopped doing a long time ago for MS.

On my machine, “My Documents” contains 1,347 files in 53 folders.

Of those, I created 4 files.

But to be fair, I don’t use “My Documents” as a place to put my stuff. Perhaps this is why.

I don’t use the my documents folder anymore for storing my documents… i created a “users” folder and place everything in there. (Even in another partition, so when a reinstall is needed… just format c:)

My ‘My Documents’ isn’t that bad, a few programs have felt like placing files there, however it’s only 1-2 and it’s very unnoticeable as I have a lot of university papers are such saved there as a sort of ‘backup’ in case a professor tells me they lost my paper, again.

But interestingly ( unless this has changed ) I believe that in order to achieve “Games For Windows” accreditation, you have to place the Save Game data in My Documents

( Please, someone tell me I’m wrong )

But interestingly ( unless this has changed ) I believe that in order to achieve “Games For Windows” accreditation, you have to place the Save Game data in My Documents

Isn’t a saved game a file a user has created? Isn’t it appropriate to place it there then? To me it’s nice know that if I’m having a hard disk crash, that I only have ONE folder location to recover. I grew up gaming on Win9x and at almost EVERY LAN party everyone would be reformatting their machines because of all the Viruses and other malware floating around. Trying to go through 10+ games to get all of your saved data is Extremely annoying.

Being administrator or not should also be mentioned here. If you are an administrator (or possibly power user) on you machine you can update the “Program Files” (it is called different things in different languages) folders and store the data together with the binaries. If you are not the settings must be stored somewhere else.

Now Dotnet2 solves this by splitting myapplication.config into the “Program Files” part and a user part. Guess where the user part is placed? Where else can it be placed?