STOP! Don't Name That File Without First Watching This Video.

In this video, I talk about a very important topic that doesn't get discussed as much as it should, especially regarding individual desktop computer users. And that topic is File Naming Conventions, which are frameworks to help guide you in giving your files more descriptive names that make them easier to identify, search, sort, etc.

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[cherubinth]

I usually just use "Untitled", because this is what the software seems to recommend.

[phrtao]

I used to work in IT and file naming conventions was one of our major problems. No one ever stuck to them so we used to provide software for automatically naming files, either from user input or from reading the content and original location. We found people would not invest time or money in naming conventions - they thought that content searching would sort it all out for them. Those with lots of money and documents bought Microsoft Sharepoint ! (and never found anything ever again)

[espertalhao]

I personally prefer underscore for file names.
Why? Because, when you program something, underscores can be selected a lot easily.
You can just double-click the name and
If you use hyphens,

However, for dates, it is hard to make it readable with underscores...
I do like that you use the year-month-day format, as it is the superior format for dates.

A remark about file capitalization:
You said that, when downloading a file on a web browser, on Windows, it will overwrite the existing file.
This is not true. Browsers will add (1) or (2) or (3) or (*n*) after the file.

[nathanmiddleton]

I'll use an underscore where there is a natural "space" but use a hypen to seperate the things between. So for example That let's me to easily seperate groups of information in the name of a file. Same goes for direcorites too, I actually like for the non-dot, visible directory names to have Proper English Casing. I suppose it's a matter of semantics, since they represent "nouns" in the home directory usually and are what is visible in the GUI and a typical ls I want them to 1- look nice, and 2- be "proper" (in the English language sense)

Also, it's good to know that NTFS is selectively able to work case sensitivity and a system user can enable it on a per-directory basis. So, this especially comes in handy if they are using WSL. Beyond that a person can use it with Windows itself as well, if they choose. Windows doesn't care, it's just that the default is insensitivity. So anyone working with linux files on a Windows machine can easily work with them in a more native format if they want to.

[wadecurry]

I use hyphens to separate words, but underscores to separate "fields". If I have an author/artist name and a title in a file name, I'll use an underscore for that.

[unfa]

About versioning files: I use zero-padded integer numbers with 2 digits (I never exceeded 99 versions of one file yet). Never use words like "final", "new" etc. because you'll go back to fix one more thing and make one more version and these words are no longer accurate. The file with the highest number version is the latest one, and also the final one :)

[breachr]

Another point to consider is the selection behaviour. In most applications/OSes a double click on hello_world will select the whole word. A double click on hello-world will only select hello or world (depending on where you clicked). Usually i want to select the whole filename, especially while using filenames in source code. Thats why i use underscores as a separator. But the use case may vary.
Nice video btw 🙂

[lunalildragon]

As a programmer I use underscores since a lot of programming languages like python have problems with hyphen since they also represent subtractions.

[TheRobzzo]

I'm glad you shared your ideas about this. I was starting to fear I was the only one who gave any thought to these kinds of conventions. I work at an academic institution where we exchange a lot of files. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who has a file naming convention; everyone else names files inconsistently and haphazardly. As a result, we have chaos in our shared repositories and it drives me nuts. Since they're accessed through web interfaces, I can't even use grep. It's crazy. I proposed a system and spent a lot of time cleaning up some of the repositories, but I was ignored.

I've carefully written up my system. In fact, I basically follow a spec, and my files are automatically processed by scripts, so that enforces consistency and also allows for some very convenient automation. If my file name is incorrect, it doesn't parse, so I have to be serious about it.

I use both underscores and dashes (as well as periods) in file names. This makes it easier for me to read and parse. Generally, periods are the highest level separators, underscores are middle level, and dashes lowest level. So, for instance, if I want a date in the file name, the date is set off by underscores, but the fields inside the date are separated by dashes, as in
MyFile_2023-05-16.tex
I also use upper case freely to additional structure and readability. I don't have any reason to care about the default behavior of Windows; I don't use Windows.

I have conventions for version numbers, file variations, dates, etc. I also have a system of file types, which allows me to distinguish, for instance, between files that have original ideas versus notes I've taken, versus configuration files, journals, etc. It probably takes me at most a few seconds to open just about any file on my system that I created, and I have many thousands of original files.

I use Emacs to open files, even if I don't edit them in Emacs. That way I can use the Emacs name completion system, bookmarking, etc.

[xA]

Subdirectory structure should be the first component of any naming convention to organise user files.

[yuvvrajkperson]

I made this mistake in my first semester of college. All files for all subjects were keysmashes and dumped in the same folder.
Next semester was <subject name>-<assignment number>-<roll number>-<name>.pdf all sorted into folders. So organised

[squidward-]

I didn't even know I needed this. Great content !!

[cezarcj]

I was just thinking about this a couple of days ago. Thank you! This was really helpfull! :D

[sendgl]

Good advice. Hyphens preferable to underscores for the reasons you mentioned in relation to URLs being underlined.

[anon_y_mousse]

I mix hyphens and underscores in file names. I don't care about Windows users either or if they'll have problems with my filenames. Though I do try to keep to just lowercase because it's easier for me to type. However, there are always exceptions for me on that front, such as one I saw you have, AppImages, and my main folders in home which are still default names. On dates, my default screenshot name uses hyphens for the date and underscores for the time, though I'm perfectly fine with using colon as a time separator, and also setting a variable in bash with the date will only partially work. For instance, same day usage of a terminal window will correctly report the date, but if you keep the window open past midnight it'll still yield the previous date. *A* solution, which will only work from the terminal and not in shell scripts is to alias the date command and use `alias_in_question` as part of a filename. If using a shell script it would be helpful to use ~/.bash_aliases and just source it for scripts as well. Let's say you do:
alias T='date +"%H:%M:%S"' ; touch foo_bar-baz\:\:`T`; # and that'll work.

[AbandonedVoid]

For time, I also see the colons replaced with "h" for "hour" and 24-hour format so that the time is listed sequentially when alphabetized. So instead of "1:35 p.m." it's "13h35" which will come after "01h35" or "1:35 a.m."

[numan]

Thank you for mentioning using dates "correctly" in file names. Most companies/people I've traded files with use the US format MM/DD/YYYY, which, as you know, does not sort correctly. It drives me nuts.

[ArniesTech]

Never has File naming been more important than after I started video making. So damn many files 🤣😵‍💫

[encyclpedia-]

I agree with almost everything you've said: no spaces, no special characters, all lowercase, etc. The only thing I do differently is I use both hyphen and underscore. The reason? They allow me to organize files better. I can match all the characters before the hyphen and create folders based on that "prefix."

[MrGucky]

I usually add some emojis to my file names to document the emotional state I was in when creating the file. Helps a lot! 😎