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Never understood why Windows' explorer hides extension by default. Does MS fear it would confuse their users?
Yes, they think their users will be confused by and accidentally remove extensions. To be fair that might happen sometimes but it's nowhere near worth it
They already have a confirmation box when you try to change the extension. And could just as easily move it into another column where it's harder to change (explorer was like this once, a long time ago).
And yet, they keep hiding the on the rationale that it confuses the users. The most common thing on explorer is some user being confused because they can't understand what clicking on a file is supposed to do, but that's not an argument for showing them...
So, yeah, that's the surface-level explanation. But there's a deeper reason.
You seriously underestimate the stupidity of 80% of windows users. They could put multiple warnings and people would still click past them without reading then bitch to their IT team when they break something.
Yes, do as I say!
Gotta recycle this:
To be honest, it is the IT teams fault if they allow their users to click past those warnings with admin rights themselves.
Now imagine those 80% of stupid Windows users on Linux.
They already have a confirmation box when you try to change the extension
I think you overestimate the average users willingness to read anything. Only thing they know is how to bitch about things not working even when they were told exactly why it's not working/what they did (wrong)
Classic ticket.
"It's broken, it doesn't work",
"what happened?",
"I ran it like the instructions said, and it didn't do anything",
"was there an error message?",
"I don't know. Something popped up, but it was in the way so I closed it",
"Do it again, don't close the error message, and tell me what it says"Or my mom.
Me: Don't just click OK without reading the message first.
Mom: Don't click OK. Got it.
Ah, right, in the context that Windows determines filetype only on extension.
Btw, there's a bunch of mimeopen implementations for Linux. Is there something like that for Windows too?
I don't think that anything like that exists in Windows. Generally that's my least issue with windows honestly. It's a POS on so many levels
Iirc there's a massive warning popping up saying it might fuck the file
Yep.
I don't think it even fucks the file, windows just can't open it until you put the file extension back.
That would be accurate. But it would fuck with your ability to open it by just double clicking it, which less savvy users would see as fucking the file.
Right. I'm saying even having that feature (in addition to the default setting of hiding the extension by default), is a bit too much
There's the mistake we made with computing decades ago. Instead if having people learn, we dumbed things down to the lowest common denominator.
People in the 80s had no trouble using things like DOS, creating batch files, editing config files, etc. Even in the 90s, games would come with command line instructions to install them. Something went terribly wrong along the way.
I somewhat agree. Although I wouldn't say getting easier was the wrong move overall. Without guis I never would gotten into programming. If I'd never gotten into programming I would have never wanted to use command lines. So the right choices around making things easier, I think are great. But yeah if people are too uneducated to undo a file rename, that's probably a sign of a bad type of coddling.
worry about users not being able to open files after renaming them since you can also edit those extensions via text, and people aren't taught about file association.
There is a warning dialog when you edit the extension
yes there is a warning but still no guide, not in the popup, nor in the association setup to tell what things mean