Re:Dotfile Madness
by codedokode on Monday October 24, 2022 @01:39AM
(#33313277)
Hiding thumbnails cache is bad because a user might believe that the USB drive is empty and doesn't have any confidential data but the thumbnails cache might still have them.
There is no need to hide such files. Just display them as system files in Explorer.
> The standard Unix folders (usr, var, etc) are also hidden
Again there is no need to do it. Just move them to a directory named "System files".
You can’t move “var” to a “System files” folder. This would break programs which expect /var to be, well, at /var. Long ago on macOS, everything was in “System Folder”, and it worked fine, but macOS has since inherited a massive Unix legacy.
Thumbnail caches are not stored on USB drives, they’re stored somewhere else, away from your files.
For people out there on macOS, you can press Cmd-Shift-dot in Finder to toggle displaying any hidden files (including the standard UNIX hierarchy at /).
By the way, I'm pondering setting my XDG_*_HOME vars on Linux/BSD to use the macOS paths like ~/Library, just to see if the standard is actually being followed.
I did a similar thing. I set XDG_CONFIG_DIR=~/ (normally ~/.config/). It works surprisingly well, though I encountered some edge cases that eventually made me give up. Also some programs don't know about XDG_CONFIG_DIR and just hardcode ~/.config/, but you can symlink ~/.config/ -> ~/.
The standard Unix folders (usr, var, etc) are also hidden—to be honest, this is a compromise because the Unix filesystem hierarchy sucks, but we are saddled with it for backwards compatibility reasons.
I did appreciate the relative clarity of old macOS systems—everything in the OS was in “System Folder”, the rest of the filesystem was yours, and you could freely move applications without breaking anything, uninstall them by putting them in the trash, etc.