honestly - while a Mac is certainly less painful to use than winshit, putting rubbish files recursively into each(!!) accessed folder, on all thumbdrives ever inserted, that’s something Jobs deserves to burn in hell for.
I am not familiar with MacOS, but that seems like a nightmare. What is the purpose of these files?
Iirc they’re indexes for the system wide search feature, Spotlight
Is there a valid reason not to store that [[anywhere else]], ideally in Spotlight’s data?
Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as
mvto update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the.DS_Storefiles co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.
Nope, that’s the .Spotlight-{INDEX} folder which is also often created 😁
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.
You’d want that, but a lot of programs do that, both in Windows and Linux.
e.g. The
.directoryfiles with the[Desktop Entry]spec by freedesktop.org
Dolphin has the option to enable/disable the featuretoday I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine…
I have manually made
.directoryfiles (using a bash script) to set icons on folders.It feels good when programs let you know what they intend on doing.
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.
Well, those are different specifications. Apple(who wants everything for themselves) vs FDO(whose main goal seems to be interoperability)
I am not exactly a programmer. What is the .DS_Store file for?
It’s for storing your DSs, obviously.
Not for buying new DSiware games?
Kind of a mac’s version of desktop.ini. Remembers layouts and other metadata about a folder.
I learned of those files outside the context of programming. When program or file zip packages contained these random ds store files and I looked up what they are.
Turns out, it’s metadata
cachingfor macOS. Irrelevant and does not belong into [distributed or shared] packages./edit: It’s been a long time ago. Looking at it again, I guess it adds folder metadata, so it could be useful when distributing to other macOS. But for other OS, it’s noise. Either way, usually it’s not intentionally included.
See also: Let’s roll our own .zip implementation that only Mac can reliably read for…reasons
every time i get a zip file from a mac user it has a folder with random junk in it. what’s up with that? i can open the files without it so clearly those files are unnecessary
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.
Why didn’t they add resource/data forks in APFS?
APFS still supports resource forks just fine - I can unstuff a 1990’s Mac application in Sequoia on a Apple Silicon Mac, copy it to my Synology NAS over SMB, and then access that NAS from a MacOS 9 Mac using AFP and it launches just fine.
The Finder just doesn’t use most of it so that it gets preserved in file copies and zip files and such.
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUEHelps a bit.
Don’t forget:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores -bool trueyou can also delete them recursively with
find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -print -delete(adapted from this script)
Why is there a
*in front ofDS_Store?
Seems like fastly made a small mistakefind . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -print -deletewould just match the exact file and is faster.
__MACOSX folders hither and yon.
…and whoever decided a file system should be case insensitive by default, I hate you.
What’s the use case for case sensitive 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.
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.
Case insensitive handling protects end-users from doing “bad” things and confusion.
Simple solution: only allow lower case characters in file names.
Like windows and their forbidden folder names
is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity
Me working on a case insensitive DB collation 🤡🚀🐱🏍
Suffering
As much as they love to sue people, I don’t understand why Nintendo doesn’t go after Apple for trademark infringement, so that they’re forced to finally come up with a better method of storing folder attributes.
Because it’s not marketed as a product. Apple isn’t trademarking “DS”.
Stop ruining my joke.
I’m pretty sure Apple has been using those files since before Nintendo released the DS.
And emulation is legal too, but that doesn’t stop Nintendo.
Not sure they’d be stupid enough to go after someone as big as Apple though.
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).
Found one of these in the firmware zip file of my soundbar today.
Every fucking folder in the file share has one of these
Linux user has been here.
How can you tell?
*sniff* Still smells like smug.
*sniff* Still smells like smug.
.Trash-1000
Just gitignore that. Same for dot idea and whatever vscode adds, if anything
Ya, but that .idea is not inserted in eleven thousand sub folders.
It’s not, but I still prefer not pushing my config on others, or others pushing theirs on me.
git add .>git commit -m "initial">git pushLater when I
git statusor just look at the repo online… “oh crap I let .DS_Store in didn’t I…” and then I remember to set up a .gitignore and make a new commit to take out the .DS_Store and put in the .gitignore.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
Use this so that the things you need to share do get shared.
.idea/* !.idea/codeStyles !.idea/runConfigurations .vscode/* !.vscode/settings.json !.vscode/tasks.json !.vscode/launch.json !.vscode/extensions.json !.vscode/*.code-snippetsNote: I haven’t checked the vs code ones in depth, the list might not be perfect.
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.
If your whole team uses the same IDE, what’s wrong with commiting things like run configurations and code styles? I agree in general, but a wholesale ban on it is very cargo culty to me. There can be legitimate times to do it.
Absolutely nothing wrong. Their whole argument is that it delivers no guarantees about the things set in these files, but setting these presets is more about convenience than enforcing an equal development environment.
Whoever needs to enforce things like formatting and linting at the project level should be using a CI step.
Sure, fail the entire build because of a formatting problem. Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could stop that from happening? I don’t know, maybe by also adding in IDE specific formatting files? No? Oh. I wasn’t aware we could only have formatting files OR a CI format checker. 🙄
None of these things come at the expense of others. You can do both. Even if it’s part of the local build process I’d much rather know in my editor than on the terminal. And you may say “just have everyone do the same setup” to which I’d wonder what sort of magical land you live in where everyone always follows those rules and/or you can get buy in from management to spend that much time bike shedding and why you’d prefer either of them to just adding the damn file to version control to avoid it entirely.
yeah, also why I do both
I elaborated on it below. Your team will grow and shrink. No guarantee that each developer will bring the same IDE. This is especially true for open source projects.
If it works your team, no need to be dogmatic about it. Just be careful about what you put there and agree on a set of sane defaults with your team. Your project should build and run tasks without needing a specific IDE.
I get this but I commit my vscode run configuration and testing env vars.
As you should. Because the alternative is just putting it on some team wiki page where they’ll just copy and paste it to their local stuff anyways. It just saves everyone time.
That’s exactly my thinking.
.vscodedoesn’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.
Linting rules and scripts should never live in an IDE-specific directory. I should not need to know your IDE configuration to run scripts and lint my files.
I have yet to come across a language that requires configuration to be stored that way. All modern languages have separate configuration and metadata files for use cases you have defined.
As for workspace defaults, whatever IDE configuration works for you is not guaranteed to work for others. Shoving extension suggestions down their throat each time IDE is booted should not be a part of your source code, as IDE extensions should not be needed to run your code.
linting config itself wouldn’t be defined there, and it would be verified in ci and such, but a setting to tell vscode which linter and extension it should use to show warnings would be.
modern languages may have their own way for configuration but they don’t have a way to bind it to the list of vscode tasks and define how to run a debugger, which is the part that gets stored.
it’s easy to go overboard with extension suggestions, but I don’t think adding an extension for linter used, extension for formatter used, and any languages used if there’s a definitive extension.
My team is split between visual studio, vscode, and I use emacs. we have config for both vs and vscode in our repos since it makes working on a new project so much nicer and means we aren’t just sharing editor configs through side channels instead. it doesn’t do anything to me if I have editor config for an IDE I don’t use in the repo, but it makes it easier for someone new to jump in with a sort of same environment immediately
Linting rules and scripts should never live in an IDE-specific directory. I should not need to know your IDE configuration to run scripts and lint my files.
This is what I’m getting at with it being cargo culty. You can have generic scripts and also IDE specific run configurations too.
Can we stop with the absolutes?
It’s okay to commit IDE config if your team uses mostly one editor.
It’s also okay to include extension recommendations. While extensions may not be needed to run the code, depending on the editor and language they’re highly desirable. It’s that kind of extension that should be recommended. I’m sure there’s a setting to disable them if, for some reason, the editor keeps asking you.
Linting rules and scripts should never live in an IDE-specific directory.
Of course they should. Obviously it shouldn’t be the only place they are, but committing IDE code styles settings that match the externally-enforced project styles is absolutely helpful.
Or, in our project we have a bunch of scripts that you can run manually, but we also have commited IntelliJ run configurations that make running them a convenient in-IDE action.
Blue Harvest for Mac will continually clean your removable drives of these files.
When I had a Mac, literally the first thing I did was set up a Hazel rule to delete every single .DS_Store in every folder.
This seems like a bit of a scam:
On your external drives you can prevent the creation of.DS_Storedefaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores -bool trueIf you really want to continuously delete
DS_Storefrom both your internal and external hard drives you can set up a cronjob:15 1 * * * root find / -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete
DS DS DS D-not gonna work here anymore, anyway.
fd -HI '^\.DS_Store$' $HOME -tf -X rm -v
