Debian Feedback
In a recent upgrade I got the version of ls that defaults to
outputting quotes for files names, per this announcement from
coreutils.
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html
My feedback is that this should be off by default by aliasing it to
ls -N (literal quoting style). The purpose of ls when on standard
out is for the human eye to read the file names. The quotes clutter
the screen and make it harder for the eye to visually scan. It also
creates inconsistent visual display for the eye and brain to
process. For some files the all of the characters I see on the
screen represent the file name; for others some of the characters
(the quotes) do not.
The benefits cited in the above link are outweight by the visual
confusion the produce.
- The output is not unambiguous. As noted above, how the brain
needs to process the characters it sees varies from file to
file, depending on if ls put quotes there or not.
- The copy/paste benefit is hardly a benefit. The vast majority
of files are filled in with TAB completion. In cases where I
can't use TAB completion, it's simple enough to type a a quote
before and after hitting the paste option.
Debian should turn this feature into an opt-in, not the default.
Defaults should represent the principle of least astonishment and
provide the most value for the intended purpose of the program. The
primary purpose of ls on standard out is to produce human-readable
content. This is why Linux distributions often alias ls to ls
--color=auto even though color is not the default for ls. Adding
color makes ls better suited for its primary purpose.
Unfortunately, the maintainers of coreutils have made copy/paste
mildly easier in a few rare cases at the expense of serving its
primary purpose. Debian can fix this by aliasing ls to always have
-N just the same as it it adds --color=auto to the defaults.
Thanks,
--
David Mooter.
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