Linux Mint Forums

I noticed that the directory names in /home are capitalized. Why is that? I find it annoying and Windowish, and more annoying because Linux is case-sensitive. Consistency is clean and gives me that minty feeling, and this isn't consistent.

Any chance of changing them to lowercase?

cluelesscoder wrote:Any chance of changing them to lowercase?

Hopefully, none whatsoever in the distribution.

They're just symbolic links so you can delete and recreate them the way you want them.

I find it ... Windowish

If linux being "Windowish" is an issue for you, you can also uninstall the gui and just use the command line.

Good luck with that

Hopefully, none whatsoever in the distribution.

Why not?

Blame whoever created the XDG standard. You can change them to whatever you want. Here's a relevant page in the Arch Wiki about it. It's quite easy to do this, while still ensuring everything will still work and look right, like having the cool icons for your Desktop, Music, and other folders.

Wow, I never thought I would learn about this. Maybe I'll pierce the mystery of the /etc/xdg directory one day.


Main irking thing is "Documents" and "Downloads" being so close names, so when you use the terminal and want to get to one of them you type "cd Do" and hit TAB, TAB TAB.. damn! it doesn't autocomplete yet!

Thanks! If there's a standard, I can't complain I guess. Capitalized and uncapitalized directory names is not the only inconsistency in Linux.

cluelesscoder wrote:I noticed that the directory names in /home are capitalized. Why is that? I find it annoying and Windowish, and more annoying because Linux is case-sensitive.

@cluelesscoder, I agree wholeheartedly! It's definitely "Windowish" and having to stop and remember to hit the Shift button is akin to driving thru a parking lot and hitting a speed bump. Thanks for starting this thread.

@ariniares, thanks for the link, I'll be doing some research in order to tweak this behavior to my liking. That's one of the things I love about Linux, its' customization!

baptiste wrote:Main irking thing is "Documents" and "Downloads" being so close names, so when you use the terminal and want to get to one of them you type "cd Do" and hit TAB, TAB TAB.. damn! it doesn't autocomplete yet!

So, it bothers you that much when all it takes is to type either a c or w after typing Do and a single Tab is all that's needed to autocomplete? D@mn! Talk about much ado about nothing!

That non-completion of Do<tab> irritates me too. At least they didn't use "My Documents" or something else with spaces in them. Space should never have been allowed in directory or file names, they create so many problems and inconveniences.

I disagree
The best decision Microsoft ever made was to put a space in "program files", to prevent programmers from assuming they don't have to care about spaces.
On linux, you can escape space characters on the command line (have them be preceded by a \ character) as well as apostrophes and other "painful" characters.

The very fact that you have to escape or quote the spaces causes lots of headache if you try to do more complicated things that entering the name manually in a single command. I used to maintain a complex test driver system with the need to pass directory and file names back and forth and which should be portable across Windows/Linux/Whatever. Got a bug report from a Mac user that it didn't work if run from inside a directory which had space somewhere in its path. I started looking into how to handle those spaces but after a day of experimenting it became quite clear that this was simply not doable. Instead I made the program abort with an error if it discovered its current directory contained a space.