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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

when I do my OS has no trouble opening them in my image or text viewer. The issue is when I download something that should be executable, and I have to paintaskingly open a terminal, and

    cd ~/Téléchargements; chmod +x <try to remember the first letter><hit tab 15 times><miss it><go check inside the firefox download manager><restart><end up typing the whole name>

before being able to run it.

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This seems like more of a UI issue than anything. Could be fixed by simply presenting the user with a prompt asking whether they want to allow this file to execute as a program if it's missing the permissions.

Honoring that right-to-left reversal character is also a "UI Issue".

The Windows UI could just render that character as a tofu box, and not evoke its reversal semantics.

This is bad for variety of reasons.

Consider writing a bash script that makes a subdirectory with current date if it doesn't exist, downloads url from the command line argument into that directory, changes the permissions and runs it.

Then your workflow could be:

- keep terminal open

- Alt+tab to firefox, browse, copy link to executable file

- Alt+tab to terminal, ./handle.sh <paste the link> ENTER

- Alt+tab to firefox again

- rinse and repeat

There's many benefits - you don't get thousands of files in one directory (which can lead to performance degradation and even random errors), there's little risk that you run the wrong file, you don't waste as much time.

No need to open a terminal

https://files.catbox.moe/tkefli.png

the idea of having to go in those damned menus one more time just to launch an app sends shivers down my spine. I already barely tolerate windows and macOS's prompts when downloading executables.

Hum... How do you run it?

If it's from a GUI, file browsers have the capacity to that that bit too.

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