Home folder? - Revisionism

[Karl-Heinz Zimmer]

On Samstag, 25. Oktober 2003 11:38, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> On Saturday 25 October 2003 00:15, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> > On Wednesday 22 October 2003 12:38, Craig Drummond wrote:
> > > Why? When "Home Directory" sounded OK????? If you're writing a UI
> > > guide and you're telling a user to browse into a folder, whats
> > > wrong with "browse into your Home Folder". As I said *all* others
> > > are called "folder"...
> >
> > do the google test:
> >
> > "home directory": 8630000
> > "home folder": 57300
> >
> > so we replace the term 99% of the people use with a term that is
> > used in far less than 1% of the cases.
> >
> > Great job, guys. Really. Insanity at its best.
>
> And look at this one, it reminds me of 1984:
>
>  <p>
> -Each UNIX user has a so-called Home directory in which his or her
> +Each UNIX user has a so-called Home folder in which his or her
>  files as well as user-dependent configuration files are saved. If you
> -work in a Konsole window, you can easily change to your home
> directory +work in a Konsole window, you can easily change to your
> home folder by entering the <b>cd</b> command without any parameters.
>  </p>
>
> Now, I don't think we are making a service to our users to hide
> completely the fact that directory and folder are synonyms.
>
> Had the paragraph been reworded as
> "Each UNIX user has a so-called Home directory, a folder in which..."
>
>
> I would not complain. This is a tip, it is supposed to be a bit more
> in-depth than the normal GUI. And since UNIX common name for a
> directory is, oddly enough, 'directory', the paragraph is simply
> wrong, and should be reworded.
>
> And if the user is supposed to work in a Konsole window, I think the
> sooner she makes the association directory<->folder, the better.

I fully agree and think this tip text is one of the (few?) occasions
that might be used to tell people that the "folder" actually is called
a "directory" in most other publications...

Perhaps the following version of the text would be both correct and
usefull for teaching people this:

       "Each UNIX user has a so-called "home directory", a
        folder in which..."

By writing like this we would show that "home directory" is a name of
this special folder - so people could easily understand what is meant
when they stumble over the word "directory" in some other books or
manpages or where ever...

Using the word folder in an consistent way does not necessarrily
require us to give up a chance like this where we could silently
spread some 'unix slang knowledge'.  ;-)

Just my 2 pence.

Karl-Heinz
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