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42 comments
  • If you spend a lot of time at the command line, then spaces in filenames are REALLY annoying. If you don't, it doesn't matter.

  • TLDR; No

    It hasn't been necessary in a long time, unless you're a developer who frequently needs to type in filenames in everywhere (since the command line needs extra protection against spaces and other symbols)

    The OS (Windows, Mac, Android, etc) handles thar all for you so you don't have to worry about it (unless you happen to use a badly-written program that doesn't understand spaces, but this is super rare to begin with, and more protected against as time goes on)

  • never use spaces. never use special characters like |$&";?*'. avoid non-ascii. case is preference, i personally use kebab-case

  • Windows has issues with leading spaces in certain applications, but no, you don't need to replace spaces with underscores in general nowadays.

  • Personally, I try to keep some rules for myself while using a system. I used to use spaces for readability, but then it was kind of hard to remember all the names of my files, so i just went with a conceptual naming. I now use keywords and some classification like numbers or date before the keywords, it has helped me to find files quicker and with less words than before.

  • I'd still advise against it if you're using Windows. A space is interpretered as more than a single character meaning you'll hit the 255 character limit for paths quicker if you have a large folder structure. I've seen this happen many times in my time as a support technician.

42 comments