[Bug 3212] Option to hide backup files as well as dotfiles?

[Stephan Sokolow]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3212         




------- Additional Comments From kde_bugzilla.zen.ssokolow spamgourmet com  2008-06-28 00:26 -------
My main worry with a filter regex is that it could get unwieldy very quickly and, depending on how it's implemented, could be useless anyway.

For example:

.+(~|#|\.bak)|/home/ssokolow/StepMania

Imagine how that would look as the number of special-case files like ~/StepMania grew. As for "useless", it's utility depends on being able to match against the entire path... which is rather unlikely in a well-designed system.

Hence why I think that, if there is a filter regex, it should be in addition to something based around xattrs or .hidden. I do agree that, if it's going to be "done right", xattrs are the way to go. However, keep in mind that per-view hiding is outside the scope of the .hidden design since it's basically a way to duplicate Windows' familiar "Hide a file without renaming it" ability.

While I do agree that renaming files to mark them hidden is a quirky hack and as bad as using extensions to identify files, I don't like the idea of a system-wide filter list at the expense of the user. I envision all sorts of problems because applications could start basing their filenames on the most popular hiding regexes, resulting in confusion for users with non-default ones. Therefore, I think it'd be best if anything global was an /etc/skel-ish default rather than being an actual runtime-checked config setting.

In short, I suggest this:
- Per-user filter regex (perhaps stored in a DE-independent /etc/skel-able file)
- System-wide xattr-based hidden file attribute (Possibly with a .hidden compatibility mode)