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Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin | Hacker News Reader

On old Macs you could drag files and folders on the desktop, work from there, and then put them back where they belonged with a single command, one by one or all at once. Applications used file IDs to refer to them, so all references kept working (not only with the desktop, but with all moves and renames). But old Macs had a different filesystem; modern filesystems are probably not fit for that.

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Yeah I think that's the ideal use of the desktop, as a temporary area for what you're currently working on. It's a shame that Microsoft didn't copy the "Put Away" feature when they added desktop icons to Windows 95, and the desktop became a combination of a generic storage area for files and a place where program installers dump application shortcuts. Then everybody (including Apple for Mac OS X) copied Microsoft's approach instead of Apple's.

On very old Macs, the files did not actually move! Just a flag on file metadata. IIRC, it was System 7 that introduced the Desktop folder.

I suppose today the substitute workflow would be to alias/shortcut something onto the desktop, then delete it from the desktop when you are done.

Modern macOS still lets you keep editing a file even if it's moved somewhere else, I think because file editing is done with the actual file ID rather than its bare location on the filesystem.

Windows, on other hand, prevents you from doing this in my experience.

Correct. It's not so much "modern macOS" though, it's a feature of APFS[1].

  > Most of us still think of file systems in simple terms, like HFS+. Duplicate or copy a file, and macOS copies all the data to a new storage area and makes that a different file. Thankfully, APFS is much smarter than that, and regularly – indeed, as a rule whenever it can – doesn’t copy any data at all. What it does is create a clone file, which is a bit like a hard link, in that the file record points to the same data as the original. Unlike a hard link, the clone is a separate file, with its own iNode.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/29/explainer-deduplication/

Linux can theoretically do this, but only if the editing application keeps the file open between saves, which they don't.

It also keeps a file around on disk with no way to access it as long as it's open.

When are we getting filesystem transactions.

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