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I always wondered why "directories" were renamed to "folders".

Now, in Win7, I bring up file explorer. Click on "Documents". It says at the top it is located in "Libraries -> Documents". But that isn't where it is. It's in c:\users\name\documents".

I never understood why there are two separate file systems mapping to the same files. It's madness.

Neither some people at Microsoft, as evidenced by recent 10 update delete fiasco.

Yeah that's a thing Microsoft did a few years ago, they wanted to change the locations and names for certain types of files, but instead of doing a move / copy, they created virtual folders like Documents and Pictures where you can add multiple folders to. It's confusing and I hope they'll offer to consolidate all that at some point.

Which reminds me of iTunes, which I've used on Windows for years. It had an option to automatically consolidate files and store them in a sane location automatically when adding music. It was great.

They are super special folders too. I like to have my Downloads on a separate hard drive because of my tiny SSD. You can't make symlink with those Quick access directories though, you break them. You have to go into the properties of the item and change their Location.

Oh, and if you broke them it's not like Windows will fix them for you, no you need to head over to Super User and read some solutions.

I think "folder" is a more practical name than "directory". Group or fileset or collection, etc., would probably work, too. The problem with directory is that it is describing the implementation instead of the result.

The result you're after as an ordinary user is a container holding a group of files, not a "directory" that lets you look up a filename and be told where to go find it. As an implementation, of course, the latter is closer to what a file system "directory" really does, but that's not the most useful metaphor to present to the ordinary user.

And does a phone directory contain individual listings plus other phone directories? No, but that's what "directory" meant to most people back when the name was changed to "folder". And the name change happened when GUIs were first created and needed icons to represent a thing to drop files into. You don't drop files into directories, you drop them into folders or file drawers or something. (Of course, my father can't stop calling a folder a "file", because file folders were so often called "files" at the office way back when. Oh, well.)

I've called them "directories" since before the Mac existed, so the word was long ago defined in my head by the thing itself and could be called a watermelon for all the difference it would make to me, but if I look at it with a beginner's mind, "directory" doesn't seem like a very good name.

No. A directory gives you a list of pointers to data and files. A folder contains that data and files (though directories can conveniently contain them, too). On the web, any URI that ends with a "/" is specified to look first for an index file--such as index.html--which should contain a listing of links to files and other directories.

> A directory gives you a list of pointers to data and files. A folder contains that data and files (though directories can conveniently contain them, too)

From an implementation perspective, you are correct. But that doesn't rebut what your parent comment is saying.

> On the web, any URI that ends with a "/" is specified to look first for an index file--such as index.html--which should contain a listing of links to files and other directories.

That is not my experience with most of the web. I've seen it, but not really that much in the past 6 years.

I don't recall the RFC number but it is in the standard specification.

I'm not saying that this is incorrect, just that it is irrelevant.

Because Windows 95 intended to shamelessly ripoff the Mac, where the "folder" nomenclature originated.

why "directories" were renamed to "folders"

I was just reading about that today. Alan Kay is to blame it seems, as for so much. :-)

"The desktop metaphor was first introduced by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1970 and elaborated in a series of innovative software applications developed by PARC scientists throughout the ensuing decade. The first computer to use an early version of the desktop metaphor was the experimental Xerox Alto"[0]

For the wider context about desktop/folders etc see [1][2]

I found this [3] story linked to a while ago on here fascinating, about all the user testing done for Windows 95. They did a lot of watching people use the file/folder system, change things around etc, repeat etc. It's kind of funny, the problems people had.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_...

[3] https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience. There is no mechanical reasons computers should have a single inheritance structure for locating files except familiarity and files being what files are now isn't a necessity either, zip files have a whole collection of files inside of them.

I think as time goes by we'll see which of the concepts of computing we grew up with end up being core to the usage of a computer and I'd be especially excited if we went in the direction of relational linkage of assets the computer has access to.

> But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience

Abstractions common to literally every home computer operating system from the last several decades.

And absent from (or at least heavily obfuscated on) the mobiles and tablets young students use as their primary computing devices.

Except games consoles. And tablets. And phones. And quite a lot of online services..

Phones have files and directories and there are several apps targeting normal audiences.

In other words, "that's how we've always done it". Is the justification for continuing to do it that way when the very foundation of that is based on outdated abstractions? As mentioned, there's no tangible reason for using directories and files as organizations except that we're fitting modern paradigms into existing ones. We're retro-fitting them to a system that existed because of technical limitations that don't exist now, for some reason.

I often grumble at the lack of usability of the directory hierarchy. Even though I grew up with directories and the FHS. To often I know what file I want but have to navigate an entire filesystem. This is especially true for non native open source Linux tools on macOS. They don't use the native file browser (which is not without its faults either) and often force you to start from root instead of a logical place like your home.

There is really no use to have all files and folders on your fs available for opening or saving in most apps. Often you just need the most recent modified file or only files of a certain type. And there are really not a lot of places it makes sense to save files to outside of your home folder and personal project layout.

Ted Nelson used to refer to it as "the tyranny of the file".

But he didn't really offer an alternative (other than Xanadu). And a hierarchical system of storage is convenient for lots of people - once they understand what "hierarchy" means.

I think understanding hierarchy is one of those epiphanies that a new computer user can sometimes have. Others simply don't seem to be able to grok it.

I've always found WinFS[1] to be a pretty interesting attempt at a relational filesystem. Although it was probably a bit too ambitious, which led to it being cancelled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Consumer PCs these days make it hard. There are so many (really terrible) tools on these Computers. Ex. last month I asked a friend (a very not computer guy), if he could give me some pictures from an event last summer. I gave him an USB drive. Next day he came and asked for help to copy the files. We saw the pictures in his Photo App. Of course it was NOT possible to copy the files from this App. I had no idea where they where on his PC. Even for me it was finally difficult just to copy some files on his new Win 10 PC.

Oh yeah, Apple is being very difficult with this app; stashing all photos in a not easily accessed folder structure, and basically pushing people to preferring sharing via icloud over just the files.

You can literally drag them from the Photos app to your usb drive, my dude…

But not into e.g. the terminal. Apple Photos is useful, but it absolutely mucked up the idea of pictures as files (it has to.)

You can drag images from Photos directly into the terminal and they will drop as a path to the image you dragged. If you drag a thumbnail, you get a path to the thumbnail; if you drag a full-resolution image, you get a path to that.

That's pretty much how I would expect an app like this to work on a Mac!

> You can drag images from Photos directly into the terminal and they will drop as a path to the image you dragged. If you drag a thumbnail, you get a path to the thumbnail; if you drag a full-resolution image, you get a path to that.

Really? What if you want to copy a group of images? If what you describe is correct, when you drag and drop a group of images, wouldn't you get copies of the thumbnails.

I'm pretty sure my GF did this. I asked her for full res copies of some images of us, and got resized low-res versions. She uses iPhoto said she just dragged them out of the app. I had to fuss around with it and finally got what I wanted by using an export feature.

Dragging and dropping each full-resolution images one by one sounds like a nightmare.

> That's pretty much how I would expect an app like this to work on a Mac!

If this is what's now expected from Macs, oh how Apple has fallen. I can think of zero use cases where you'd actually want to drag and drop the thumbnail out, but not the full resolution image.

I think you misunderstood. If you're dragging thumbnails onto a flash drive, it'll copy the source photos, not copies of the thumbnails. The terminal example is thumbnails or full photos since the files themselves can't be used by the terminal. You have to specify whether you want it to pull a location for the thumbnail or the full photo. In that instance, you wouldn't be using multiple files because there's no use case for a terminal where sequential files would be used without some kind of additional characters or arguments.

As the other person has pointed out that you can easily drag/drop, in macOS you can usually find the paths by right clicking and going to some ‘info’ part.

Everyone else is talking about Apple, but I thought you were talking about Windows, because I had the same problem: the Metro Photos app likes to store things in AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe (!)

> the Metro Photos app likes to store things in (AppData)

I think that might be a bug. Windows 10 Photos app is surprisingly good about exposing your file system nicely, without the jank of a 'private proprietary hidden library' that other photo apps sometimes use.

Right click any photo to "Show in File Explorer" directly, or click Settings and it will show you a list of "Source Folders" it scans for pictures. Double click any "Source Folder" to jump straight into it.

At least, that's all present in the current version of Photos (2018 v18081.14710)

Having not touched windows for almost a decade and getting told I had to use a windows 10 laptop to work on... well

Frustration.

That said the performance of the OS is pretty good. When I learned Powershell wasnt available at cmd things got a bit better.

Ended up with a Linux VM simply because I dont have time to figure out how to reproduce simple Linux CLI commands on windows.

Every consider trying WSL? It's built into windows and gives you a full linux shell

Thanks. I will look into this when I get a chance. I am sort of hoping to convince people I dont need windows.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

That's like Google using .webp to serve photos on some of it's sites. Great, now I have to teach someone else to find the download button to get a jpeg.

In general, only a minority of power users truly understand files and folders. Most other people organize information differently.

A true "universal" application needs to flex its interface for people who understand files and folders, and those who don't. (Most applications don't need to be this flexible, though.)

Files and folders make perfect sense to someone who worked in an office 20 years ago. The office would likely have been furnished with cabinets full of literal folders containing paper documents.

I haven't used a file cabinet at work in over a decade. I still have a file drawer at my desk but there are no folders in it. So in that regard, familiarity with the concept is probably a lot lower than it used to be.

What probably makes more sense to users today would be tagging or labeling documents into categories. Could still be implemented as files, folders, and links, but the presentation might make more sense using other analogues.

Just a little nit: files, directories and paths are popular concepts today due to the prevalence of hierarchical filesystems, but not necessarily fundamental to computing. You can have a computer without any of those things, just not one that looks like today’s computers. My home computer in the 80s had only one of those(files) and even that concept was optional because storage was optional.

Working in a school, not as a teacher, it is amazing to see how students litter their desktop with files, similar to how most of the staff save their files.

I am not a programmer by any means and I know how important it is to create a filing system with directories. It is irritating how much time is lost while waiting for colleagues to locate a file hidden among the many on their desktop.

I bet you'll love this: https://johnnydecimal.com/

Edit: Sorry, I should have saved you the bother of clicking. It's a digital file management strategy loosely inspired (I assume) by library classification systems like Dewey's. I don't use it myself, but I admire the simplicity, clarity, and flexibility of the system.