22 ms·

The Origins of DS_store (2006)

554 points by edavis 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
Aside from this file, the "fork" concept of Mac file systems caused some wtf moments. Fork not being fork() but being the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. In Unix, the metadata was in the directory block inode, and wasn't bound to the file in a formalism uniquely, it had to be represented by structure in tar, or cpio or zip distinctly. Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it. You couldn't map all the properties of the resource fork into an inode block of the time in UFS. It has stuff like the icon. More modern fs may have larger directory block structure and can handle the data better.
- senderista 2y ago
  You have the same "resource fork" concept in Unix xattrs and NTFS streams.
  - ggm 2y ago
    No disagree, Both came later IIRC. Melbourne unis work on appletalk and Apple file system support was in the late 80s and I believe POSIX xattr spec work was mid nineties, NTFS was '93 or so. The fork model in apple file store was eighties work.
    - nullindividual 2y ago
      GP wasn’t arguing about timelines. NTFS ADS were created to accommodate Mac OS resource forks on network volumes when using AFP.
      - ggm 2y ago
        Gotcha! I assumed they were invented for Windows centric reasons.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The concept of extended file attributes has been introduced by HPFS, in OS/2, in 1989. From HPFS it was taken by SGI XFS (the ancestor of Linux XFS) and MS NTFS, both in 1993. From there it has spread to various other file systems and specifications. The concept of resource forks is earlier, but both are examples of using alternate data streams in a file.
- pkaye 2y ago
  NTFS has alternate data streams. I think its hardly ever used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(ADS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(AD...
  - asvitkine 2y ago
    Used by malware mostly, I think.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    I used to dual boot OS X and Windows on my Mac in the late 2000s. I am pretty certain when I open the HFS+ volume and copy things to the NTFS volume, some stuff became alternate data streams. Windows even had a UI to tell me about it. I didn't understand it then but my guess would be that's the resource fork.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    The article said most browsers mark downloaded files.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      That's done as part of xattr, or extended attributes. It's a very flexible system. For example you can add comments to a file so they are indexed by Spotlight.
      - p_l 2y ago
        Except NTFS does not have "extended attributes" in Linux/Irix/HPFS sense. Every FILE object in the database is ultimately (outside of some low level metadata) a map of Type-(optional Name)-Length-Value entries, of which file contents and what people think of as "extended attributes" are just random DATA type entries (empty DATA name marks the default to own when you do file I/O). It's similar to ZFS (in default config) and Solaris UFS where a file is also a directory
        2y ago
- kzrdude 2y ago
  Resource fork used to contain all the stuff you could edit with ResEdit (good old times!) right? Icons, various gui resources, could be text and translation assets too. For example Escape Velocity plugins used custom resource types and a ResEdit plugin made them easy to edit there.
  - whartung 2y ago
    The other big thing in the resource fork was the executable code segments that made up the application. In fact applications typically had nothing but the data fork at all. It was all in the resource fork.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    I credit ResEdit hacking partially for steering my path towards becoming a programmer. I had my Classic Mac OS installs throughly customized, as well as the other various programs and games that stored their assets in resource forks. It was a lot of fun and something I’ve missed in modern computing. Not even desktop Linux is really fills that void. ResEdit and the way it exposed everything complete with built-in editors was really something special.
    - be_erik 2y ago
      ResEdit and using it to modify Escape Velocity is 100% the reason I’m still in this industry.
      - tarsinge 2y ago
        Same here but only for joining the industry. Now it's the opposite, that webdev still hasn't reached that level of maturity of classic Mac OS makes me want to quit.
  - worstspotgain 2y ago
    A lot of Classic Mac apps just used the resource fork to store all their data. It was basically used as a Berkeley DB, except the keys were limited to a 32-bit OSType plus a 16-bit integer, and performance was horrible. But it got the job done when the files were small, had low on-disk overhead, and was ridiculously easy to deploy. Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt, thrashing the disk like crazy on any save. Apple's algorithm would shift huge chunks of the file multiple times per set of updates, when usually it would be better to just rewrite the entire file once. IIRC, part of the problem was an implicit commitment to never strictly requiring more than a few KBs of available disk space. In a sense, the resource fork was just too easy and accessible. In the long run, Mac users ended up suffering from it more than they benefited. When Apple finally got rid of it, the rejoice was pretty much universal. There was none of the nostalgia that usually accompanies disappearing Apple techs, especially the ones that get removed outright instead of upgraded (though one could argue that's what plists, XML and bundles did.)
- Someone 2y ago
  > the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. Application metadata describing what file types an application could open, what icons to use for those file types if they matched the application’s creator code was stored in the resource fork of the application, but file metadata never was stored in the resource fork. File types, creator codes, lock, invisible, bozo, etc. bits always were stored in the file system. See for example the description of the MFS disk format at https://wiki.osdev.org/MFS#File_Directory_Blocks https://wiki.osdev.org/MFS#File_Directory_Blocks
- dylan604 2y ago
  It was all of the forked data that made dual format CDs/DVDs "interesting". In the beginning it was a trick. Eventually, the Mac burning software made it a breeze. Making a Mac bootable DVD was also interesting.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    I recall seeing CD-ROMs that had both Mac and Windows software on it, and depending on which OS it was mounted on, it would show the Windows EXE or the Mac app... I wonder how that's done. I'm guessing there was a clever trick so files on both filesystems share the same data (e.g. if the program/game had a movie, it would only store the bytes of the movie once but its addressable as a file on each filesystem), but that sounds like a nightmare. I can probably look it up and figure it out myself, ah, the joys of learning about obsolete tech!
    - dylan604 2y ago
      There were also the audio CDs that had data on them. Audio CD players would just play the audio, but a CD-ROM could access both. Some had apps that were games that would play the audio portion for the game. If you want to know about the different types of CDs, you'll want to know about the various colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
      - dmicah 2y ago
        Some Playstation 1 were setup to also play the game soundtrack if you put them in an audio CD player.
        nullindividual 2y ago
        MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (for PC) was the same way. Rocking soundtrack. Beautiful game, provided you had a Voodoo 2.
        2y ago
- klodolph 2y ago
  > One metadata and one the file contents. I’d say this is not the right way to describe a resource fork. Instead, think of it as two sets of file contents—one called "data" and one called "rsrc". On-disk, they are both just bytestreams. The catch is that you usually store a specific structure in the resource fork—smaller chunks of data indexed by 4-byte type codes and 2-byte integer IDs. Applications on the 68K normally stored everything in the resource fork. Code, menus, dialog boxes, pictures, icons, strings, and whatever else. If you copy an old Mac application to a PC or Unix system without translation, what you got was an empty file. This meant that Mac applications had to be encoded into a single stream to be sent over the network… early on, that meant BinHex .hqx or MacBinary .bin, and later on you saw Stuffit .sit archives. That’s why these structures don’t fit into an inode—it’s like you’re trying to cram a whole goddamn file in there. The resource fork structure had internal limits that capped it at 16 MB, but you could also just treat it as a separate stream of data and make it as big as you want.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    In Unix, it's said that "Everything is a file" - i.e. that everything on the system that applications need to manage should either be actual files on disk or present themselves to the application as if they were files. This adage translated to classic MacOS becomes "Everything is a resource". The Resource Manager started out as developer cope from Bruce Horn for not having access to SmallTalk anymore[0], but turned out to completely overtake the entire Macintosh Toolbox API. Packaging everything as type-coded data with standard-ish formats meant cross-cutting concerns like localization or demand paging were brokered through the Resource Manager. All of this sounds passe today because you can just use directories and files, and have the shell present the whole application as a single object. In fact, this is what all the ex-Apple staff who moved to NeXT wound up doing, which is why OSX has directories that end in .app with a bunch of separate files instead. The reason why they couldn't do this in 1984 is very simple: the Macintosh File System (MFS) that Apple shipped had only partial folder support. To be clear, MFS did actually have folders[1], but only one directory[2] for the entire volume. What files went in which folders was stored in a separate special file that only the Finder read. There was no Toolbox support for reading folder contents, just the master directory, so applications couldn't actually put files in folders. Not even using the Toolbox file pickers. And this meant the "sane approach" NeXT and OSX took was actually impossible in the system they were developing. Resources needed to live somewhere, so they added a second bytestream to every file and used it to store something morally equivalent to another directory that only holds resources. The Resource Manager treats an MFS disk as a single pile of files that each holds a single pile of resources. [0] https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html?sort=date https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html?sort=d... [1] As in, a filesystem object that can own other filesystem objects. [2] As in, a list of filesystem objects. Though in MFS's case it's more like an inode table...
- a-dub 2y ago
  resource and data forks were hfs(+) features that appeared in pre-osx versions of macos. post-osx made use of the bsd fast filesystem and a rather nice unix style convention from nextstep where the on-disk representation of a .app or .pkg (which would appear as a single entity in the gui) was actually a directory tree. this would rather elegantly include ui resources as well as multiple binaries for cross platform support.
- euroderf 2y ago
  > Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it. Prefixing the file name with a single dot - is this a file system convention ? Or just a "good idea" ?
  - ggm 2y ago
    Unix convention to hide. .Files hidden from ls unless -a used but cd .config/ works fine. It matched the use of . For "this dir" and .. for "parent dir" also hidden by default. It was in v7 on a pdp11, my first experience of Unix in 1980. Probably pre-dated that.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      Oh sure. I started with v6 on a pdp-10 in 1979. And the leading dot is ingrained in my brain. But what I'm wondering about is the idea of associating (for example) "myfile.xyz" and ".myfile.xyz". I've never heard of this as a convention for associating metadata.
  - mmaniac 2y ago
    Prefixing the filename with ._ is Finder convention whenever you copy metadata to a filesystem which doesn't support resource forks, like FAT32
metadat 2y ago
It's worth mentioning how to turn off the creation of .DS_Store files by default while browsing network volumes - otherwise the directory modified timestamps are updated as you browse using the Finder, which is Just Plain Terrible. https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/lvju40/comment/gpc8ils/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/lvju40/comment/gpc8i...
- black_puppydog 2y ago
  Personally I make sure mac users do this before they get write access to a network share. It's just a matter of common curtesy IMHO.
  - chrisweekly 2y ago
    curtsy (feminine bow) -> courtesy (polite act)
    - philwelch 2y ago
      Yes, but it’s a common courtesy to perform a curtsy in the appropriate situation.
      - DidYaWipe 2y ago
        And failure to do so might come off as curt, see?
  - vetinari 2y ago
    Set up a veto on your network share (https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html#VETOFILES https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5...).
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  If you run Samba you can also configure Samba to just ignore such creations.
l33tman 2y ago
Maybe unrelated to this, but I noticed fairly recently that my backups from my macbook now backup seemingly randomly modified pdf and txt files all over the disk. My guess is that whenever I search for something, it decides to touch a couple of hundred files (but not ALL pdf/txt files for some reason).
thought_alarm 2y ago
> Those files should only be created if the user actually makes adjustments to the view settings or set a manual location for icons in a folder. That’s unfortunately not what happens and visiting a folder pretty much guarantees that a .DS_Store file will get created This is my number one frustration with the Finder. You can customize the look and size of individual folder windows in many interesting ways, al a the Classic Mac OS Finder, which is a really great feature. But if you blow through that same folder in a browser window then most of those customization are lost, overwritten with the settings of that browser window, even if you never change anything. What's the point of allowing all of these great customizations when they're so easily clobbered? I have a global hot key to bring up the Applications folder. I'd love to customize the look of that window, but it's pointless. Whenever I hit that hot key I have no idea what I'm going to get. It's always getting reset. By the way, the reason it does this is because the Finder has no way to set a default browser window configuration. So instead, it just leaves behind the current browser settings in each folder it visits. Super frustrating.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- dreamcompiler 2y ago
  > I have a global hot key to bring up the Applications folder Not global, but as long as you're in the Finder cmd-shift-A opens the Applications folder. cmd-shift-U opens the Utilities folder.
- mzs 2y ago
  It used to be before darwin that every open folder corresponded to one window and there was only one user, so that approach worked. I really miss that, it was nice having the same window pop to the front with everything just like you last had it before.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Not to mention that it's an obnoxious and incompetent design. Look at the fact that Mac OS litters every other computer it visits with turds, for its own (and in fact only one user's) benefit. It's doubly stupid because the next browsing Mac that comes along trounces the previous one's turd. If Apple wanted to store view settings for remote volumes (or even local volumes), the competent design would have been to store them locally (and per user) in a central location on the machine doing the browsing. I remember the promised re-write of Finder and thought it never happened. Nothing seems to have improved for the user. I could post a list of decades-old defects that persist today. The one thing I can think of that has finally been fixed (and this was long after the "rewrite") was that you can now finally sort the file list properly: with folders at the top. Now I wish someone would explain something that might actually be worse than DS-turds: the presence of a "Contents" subdirectory in every goddamned Apple package. I mean... who thought you needed to create a directory called "Contents" to hold the contents of the parent directory? It's mind-boggling.
- threeseed 2y ago
  > the competent design would have been to store them locally (and per user) in a central location on the machine doing the browsing Not sure but it could be the case that when you mount a network drive there isn't a stable identifier that can be used to track it.
  - organsnyder 2y ago
    Sure, that wouldn't work if the network volume was accessed by different URIs. But it would work in 95% of cases, which is good enough.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Exactly. And if the same machine used two URIs, there'd simply be two entries for settings. And the settings cache could flush old entries periodically.
    - nullindividual 2y ago
Waterluvian 2y ago
DS Store seems so unfortunate. Yes it serves a purpose. Yes you can work around it in various ways. But the reality is that it’s basically proliferated file litter to 99% of people who come across it. It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish. Growing up with both System 7.5 / OSX, and windows machines, the Macs never seemed inclined to make me see extraneous files, filetypes, and other “how the computer works” implementation details. It’s just so odd to my mental model of it all to see this file end up everywhere.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish. Apple's polish has always been more about the surface then the internals.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    I remember playing around with setting up a Hackintosh, and found all those errors in the system logs --- then realised that an actual working Mac generates much the same (ignorable) errors.
    - plasticeagle 2y ago
      To be fair to Apple here, so does every other operating system. Linux system logs are filled with errors too. In general, keeping the logs of even a moderately complex application "clean" - so that the only errors logged are real errors, in some poorly defined meaning of "real" - is very hard. For operating systems it must be straight up impossible.
      - popcalc 2y ago
        It's difficult to accept as competency when they control both the software and hardware.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        > Linux system logs are filled with errors too. Mostly only due to misbehaving hardware. Something that should really not happen on a Mac. And "filled" is way hyperbolic, there usually isn't a lot of it.
java-man 2y ago
Also there are those dot underscore files. Is there any way to disable creating these files on the network shares? [0] https://superuser.com/questions/212896/is-there-any-way-to-prevent-a-mac-from-creating-dot-underscore-files https://superuser.com/questions/212896/is-there-any-way-to-p...
yellow_postit 2y ago
Finder remains one of those apps I still can’t make effective use of. Windows File Explorer for all its warts and changes still “just makes sense” to my brain vs how finder lays things out and expects you to browse. I’ve long since moved to command line or dual pane explorers but it’s something that makes me pause every time I do find myself in Finder for some reason.
- eek2121 2y ago
  Oh boy, Windows does the same thing (regarding hidden files to sort out FS stuff), but they hide it (just like Apple). We WSL2 users found out the hard way and Microsoft refuses to offer a solution. Relevant issue: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456 Apologies for my post getting snipped, The latest iOS beta keeps randomly eating my text. Apple is aware.
  - 0l 2y ago
    Unless im misunderstanding something, these files don't actually exist but reside in the NTFS's alternative data stream, and only display separately in WSL due to ext4 not supporting ADS right?
    - pasc1878 2y ago
      Which then is the same with Apple's ._ files Unix file systems are not sufficient, you need a layer on top.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- climb_stealth 2y ago
  I wholly agree with you on this one. Windows has its fair share of issues, but Windows Explorer feels like peak file browsing to me. For MacOS I can recommend Forklift [0]. I've been using it for years and it is a bit closer to the Windows Explorer way of doing things. Does what it is meant to do. Affordable. No nags. Gets out of the way. Not perfect, but soooo much better than the horrific experience that is Finder. [0] https://binarynights.com/ https://binarynights.com/
slmjkdbtl 2y ago
I remember there used to ways to turn off the creation of .DS_Store but they removed it, I can't figure out for life why they would make such a change. I had to write a program [0] to watch the entire file system and delete .DS_Store as soon as they're created. [0] https://github.com/slmjkdbtl/dskill https://github.com/slmjkdbtl/dskill
- gumby 2y ago
  Why? I just ignore them.
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    Some people can't.
  - prurigro 2y ago
    Google sent a copyright violation notice for each .DS_Store anyone at my company uploaded to Drive for nearly a year (yes, many support tickets were filed). It wasn't Apple's fault, but it still would have been nice if there was a way to turn them off.
    - heavyset_go 2y ago
      That's scary considering how willingly they'll shutdown accounts for tripping their automated copyright violation service.
      - prurigro 2y ago
        For sure! I made sure to have an open ticket with them until it was resolved so I'd have someone to call if some other automated system decided to shut down our services for it.
    - janalsncm 2y ago
      Why? Somehow DS_Store is claimed as a copyrighted file?
Ruq 2y ago
Every time I see it I think Nintendo DS.
KingLancelot 2y ago
[dead]
dada78641 2y ago
> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch. Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances. I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.
- esprehn 2y ago
  They did apparently rewrite it in Cocoa back in ~2008. Although that was 16 years ago so I'm sure it's accumulated a fair bit of tech debt since then.
- meindnoch 2y ago
  Based on how well the System Preferences → Settings rewrite went: please don't.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  >The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing Say what you will about Windows, but the Explore file manager has always been pretty rock solid.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    I will say, network drives feel local on Windows. On macOS they feel like network drives. I think I’d say the same about external drives. I stopped using them, because I got sick of waiting for them to spin up anytime Finder had to do some work.
  - seabird 2y ago
sherburt3 2y ago
I am MacOS's biggest fanboy and Tim Cook's strongest soldier but I will also say the Finder is one of the dumbest file explorers I've ever experienced in my life
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > I am MacOS's biggest fanboy and Tim Cook's strongest soldier wow.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- spopejoy 2y ago
  I like many things about Mac OS but I do wonder about the quality of the low-level software engineering. The preponderance of bespoke NIH is glaring: filesystems, network protocols, "resource forks" (this one goes WAY back to pascal-OS days). Given that OS X was a significant rewrite and embrace of Posix, it's a mystery why they wouldn't have gone further with this. I think the lack of a mature server OS reflects this. Single-user allows for a lot of workarounds, but a true multiuser runtime can't be hipster for its own sake.
seabass 2y ago
Never understood why it had to be in the same folder. Can’t the os have its own little db somewhere that has a reference to each path?
- stereo 2y ago
  The idea was that metadata, for example a file’s label, would travel across to whichever device you use the network drive from.
  - jojobas 2y ago
    Yeah, because such devices are only made by Apple and can or should understand Apple's internal format.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    But classic Mac OS stored “Desktop DB” and “Desktop DF” at the root of each mounted drive, IIRC. It seems like a better solution.
- neerajsi 2y ago
  Putting in in the folder is also nice in that it naturally gets deleted when the folder is deleted
  - earthboundkid 2y ago
    All file operations have been watched by Spotlight since forever at this point.
    - threeseed 2y ago
      Except for ignored file types and folders you marked as private.
      - vetinari 2y ago
        Or those on network volumes or removable media. When somebody else on other machine removes them, your local database is out of sync pronto.
deldelaney 2y ago
I miss the old Pre-OSX finder that could accomplish copy files without opening a second window and dragging into. I'll never get how some rocket scientist (IVIE I suspect) removed Apple's best finder feature, colored file folders, which made for easy sorting. To make matters worse, added stupid dot labels instead. What a cluster. Oh well. Still a bad day on a Mac is better than a great day in Windows.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  See John Siracusa"S comments on Finder https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
hoherd 2y ago
FYI there is a tool on macOS called `dot_clean` that will "Remove dot-underscore files" https://ss64.com/mac/dot_clean.html https://ss64.com/mac/dot_clean.html
kaladin-jasnah 2y ago
There's also the .fseventsd directory which I've also seen on non-UNIX systems.
ee99ee 2y ago
Most informative post ever on Hacker News. Now I know!
tripdout 2y ago
Why doesn't Windows need such a directory to store folder customizations in Explorer?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- steve1977 2y ago
  Explorer uses a hidden desktop.ini file for this.
  - OptionOfT 2y ago
    Negative. desktop.ini doesn't get edited when you switch (for example) from Details to List. Also, I think only the desktop allows moving icons around freely.
    - steve1977 2y ago
      I guess a more correct answer would have been that deskop.ini is used for some folder customizations.
    - reddalo 2y ago
      > only the desktop allows moving icons around freely I'm pretty sure Windows used to allow you to move icons around, I clearly remember making a mess on some Windows 98 folders. Maybe they removed that feature recently?
      - IIsi50MHz 2y ago
        Windows stores/stored in the registry a limited number of file folders' icon layouts. Once you go over the limit, the oldest config is erased. I think the original limit was 200, but could be overridden using a registry key.
gregmac 2y ago
As a non-Mac user, I always find it somewhat annoying when I download some .tgz published on Github or something and find .DS_Store littered inside. I guess macos probably just uses GNU tar? It's kind of surprising it wasn't modified or configured by default to ignore .DS_Store.
- willsmith72 2y ago
  Ah that reminds me I committed a few last week and never cleaned it up..
  - tekknik 2y ago
    Global ignore.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  > It's kind of surprising it wasn't modified or configured by default to ignore .DS_Store. It was, but not by default. If you export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true then tar will skip .DS_Store files.
- sneed_chucker 2y ago
  Most of Mac's Unix utils come straight from FreeBSD without any special sauce from Apple.
  - leptons 2y ago
    They had the chance to get rid of DS_store, but they put it in MacOS anyway?
    - pasc1878 2y ago
      er. as the article says - it was created for OSX and not classic macOs
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Apple patches most of their utilities. This is frequently annoying when trying to track down what they did :)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rkachowski 2y ago
> Internally, those two components were known as Finder_FE and Finder_BE (Frontend and Backend). Interesting to see that apps were split into front and back end (indeed, I'm surprised even that the terms existed) back in 1999.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  Why are you surprised? I have been writing client server apps since the late 80s. Originally a central DB and a PC front end. But the server could be doing business processing e.g. feeds and processing of stock prices. Client Server predates the web.
workfromspace 2y ago
When I saw `DS_store` inside the title, my eyes automatically filtered out and ignored that word for few seconds. I had to re-read. That's how I see these files. And maybe one day, we can have and edit our own .gitignore -like files for such Inattentional blindness[0]. [0]: Inattentional blindness
nanna 2y ago
Thankfully Emacs's file manager Dired lets me easily pretend this pesky little file, as well as those produced by a LaTeX run, doesn't exist. (setq dired-omit-mode t dired-omit-files "^.+\\.\$DS_Store\\|aux\\|bak\\|bbl\\|bcf\\|blg\\|dvi\\|ent\\|idx\\|ilg\\|ind\\|log\\|orig\\|out\\|pdf-view-restore\\|pdf#\\|reg\\|run.xml\\|synctex.gz\\|toc\$$")
- thiht 2y ago
  "easily" you say?
  - nanna 2y ago
    Well sure it's a bit noisy but it's just a bit of regex.
wodenokoto 2y ago
Whenever I move a file from windows into WSL via explorer I get a Zone file. I assume it’s the same things but quite annoying.
webwielder2 2y ago
> For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch. I would think that the file manager for an entirely separate operating system being written from scratch would be a foregone conclusion.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  NeXT OS had a perfectly good file manager/GUI, but I guess it was pretty different from what Mac users were used to.
wirrbel 2y ago
What's really astonishing is that no one at apple dared to fix the bug that creates these files...
sweeter 2y ago
I bought a secondhand Macbook M2 and I was genuinely shocked at how awful Finder is (no offense to this guy) it sort of reminds me of the Android file manager that hides directories and files and tells you that "you can't do that, you cant just use a folder!" That was really off putting. I ended up installing Asahi despite getting the Mac to have access to the awful apps that I can't get on Linux like MS Word and photoshop. I hate this landscape tbh.
demondemidi 2y ago
Funny all the people complaining about “this makes Mac ugly compared to Linux” meanwhile every Linux tool I install craps dotfiles not only in ~/ but in working folders as well. It’s a fact of life that tens of thousands of smart programmers realized is necessary.
- k4rli 2y ago
  Every Linux tool? Simply not true. Most tools keep it in a ~ subdir like ~/.config MacOS creates a junk file/folder just by visiting any folder. It's not comparable.
  - tekknik 2y ago
    Any linux desktop environment is going to do the same, as the DE will need to store previews and thumbnails amongst other things. Except on a linux machine this data would be stored in some other location that you’ll have to lookup and find.
  - demondemidi 2y ago
    You're right, I didn't mean 100% of all linux tools, like coreutils. But every piece of linux software I've purchased a license for does exactly this. I think people that get upset about this just need something to fret about, at least in my experience. They probably trim their speaker cables to the same length to match impedence, too.
bimguy 2y ago
Rixsteps take on .DS_Store - a much more enjoyable read. https://rixstep.com/1/20030521,00.shtml https://rixstep.com/1/20030521,00.shtml And a follow up article - https://rixstep.com/2/20061212,00.shtml https://rixstep.com/2/20061212,00.shtml
paulcapewell 2y ago
See also: 'look for (nearly) empty directories and delete them' - https://alexwlchan.net/2024/emptydir/ https://alexwlchan.net/2024/emptydir/

554 points by edavis 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

Aside from this file, the "fork" concept of Mac file systems caused some wtf moments. Fork not being fork() but being the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. In Unix, the metadata was in the directory block inode, and wasn't bound to the file in a formalism uniquely, it had to be represented by structure in tar, or cpio or zip distinctly. Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it. You couldn't map all the properties of the resource fork into an inode block of the time in UFS. It has stuff like the icon. More modern fs may have larger directory block structure and can handle the data better.

senderista 2y ago
You have the same "resource fork" concept in Unix xattrs and NTFS streams.
- ggm 2y ago
  No disagree, Both came later IIRC. Melbourne unis work on appletalk and Apple file system support was in the late 80s and I believe POSIX xattr spec work was mid nineties, NTFS was '93 or so. The fork model in apple file store was eighties work.
  - nullindividual 2y ago
    GP wasn’t arguing about timelines. NTFS ADS were created to accommodate Mac OS resource forks on network volumes when using AFP.
    - ggm 2y ago
      Gotcha! I assumed they were invented for Windows centric reasons.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The concept of extended file attributes has been introduced by HPFS, in OS/2, in 1989. From HPFS it was taken by SGI XFS (the ancestor of Linux XFS) and MS NTFS, both in 1993. From there it has spread to various other file systems and specifications. The concept of resource forks is earlier, but both are examples of using alternate data streams in a file.
pkaye 2y ago
NTFS has alternate data streams. I think its hardly ever used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(ADS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(AD...
- asvitkine 2y ago
  Used by malware mostly, I think.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  I used to dual boot OS X and Windows on my Mac in the late 2000s. I am pretty certain when I open the HFS+ volume and copy things to the NTFS volume, some stuff became alternate data streams. Windows even had a UI to tell me about it. I didn't understand it then but my guess would be that's the resource fork.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  The article said most browsers mark downloaded files.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    That's done as part of xattr, or extended attributes. It's a very flexible system. For example you can add comments to a file so they are indexed by Spotlight.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Except NTFS does not have "extended attributes" in Linux/Irix/HPFS sense. Every FILE object in the database is ultimately (outside of some low level metadata) a map of Type-(optional Name)-Length-Value entries, of which file contents and what people think of as "extended attributes" are just random DATA type entries (empty DATA name marks the default to own when you do file I/O). It's similar to ZFS (in default config) and Solaris UFS where a file is also a directory
      - 2y ago
kzrdude 2y ago
Resource fork used to contain all the stuff you could edit with ResEdit (good old times!) right? Icons, various gui resources, could be text and translation assets too. For example Escape Velocity plugins used custom resource types and a ResEdit plugin made them easy to edit there.
- whartung 2y ago
  The other big thing in the resource fork was the executable code segments that made up the application. In fact applications typically had nothing but the data fork at all. It was all in the resource fork.
- jwells89 2y ago
  I credit ResEdit hacking partially for steering my path towards becoming a programmer. I had my Classic Mac OS installs throughly customized, as well as the other various programs and games that stored their assets in resource forks. It was a lot of fun and something I’ve missed in modern computing. Not even desktop Linux is really fills that void. ResEdit and the way it exposed everything complete with built-in editors was really something special.
  - be_erik 2y ago
    ResEdit and using it to modify Escape Velocity is 100% the reason I’m still in this industry.
    - tarsinge 2y ago
      Same here but only for joining the industry. Now it's the opposite, that webdev still hasn't reached that level of maturity of classic Mac OS makes me want to quit.
- worstspotgain 2y ago
  A lot of Classic Mac apps just used the resource fork to store all their data. It was basically used as a Berkeley DB, except the keys were limited to a 32-bit OSType plus a 16-bit integer, and performance was horrible. But it got the job done when the files were small, had low on-disk overhead, and was ridiculously easy to deploy. Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt, thrashing the disk like crazy on any save. Apple's algorithm would shift huge chunks of the file multiple times per set of updates, when usually it would be better to just rewrite the entire file once. IIRC, part of the problem was an implicit commitment to never strictly requiring more than a few KBs of available disk space. In a sense, the resource fork was just too easy and accessible. In the long run, Mac users ended up suffering from it more than they benefited. When Apple finally got rid of it, the rejoice was pretty much universal. There was none of the nostalgia that usually accompanies disappearing Apple techs, especially the ones that get removed outright instead of upgraded (though one could argue that's what plists, XML and bundles did.)
Someone 2y ago
> the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. Application metadata describing what file types an application could open, what icons to use for those file types if they matched the application’s creator code was stored in the resource fork of the application, but file metadata never was stored in the resource fork. File types, creator codes, lock, invisible, bozo, etc. bits always were stored in the file system. See for example the description of the MFS disk format at https://wiki.osdev.org/MFS#File_Directory_Blocks https://wiki.osdev.org/MFS#File_Directory_Blocks
dylan604 2y ago
It was all of the forked data that made dual format CDs/DVDs "interesting". In the beginning it was a trick. Eventually, the Mac burning software made it a breeze. Making a Mac bootable DVD was also interesting.
- netsharc 2y ago
  I recall seeing CD-ROMs that had both Mac and Windows software on it, and depending on which OS it was mounted on, it would show the Windows EXE or the Mac app... I wonder how that's done. I'm guessing there was a clever trick so files on both filesystems share the same data (e.g. if the program/game had a movie, it would only store the bytes of the movie once but its addressable as a file on each filesystem), but that sounds like a nightmare. I can probably look it up and figure it out myself, ah, the joys of learning about obsolete tech!
  - dylan604 2y ago
    There were also the audio CDs that had data on them. Audio CD players would just play the audio, but a CD-ROM could access both. Some had apps that were games that would play the audio portion for the game. If you want to know about the different types of CDs, you'll want to know about the various colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
    - dmicah 2y ago
      Some Playstation 1 were setup to also play the game soundtrack if you put them in an audio CD player.
      - nullindividual 2y ago
        MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (for PC) was the same way. Rocking soundtrack. Beautiful game, provided you had a Voodoo 2.
        2y ago
klodolph 2y ago
> One metadata and one the file contents. I’d say this is not the right way to describe a resource fork. Instead, think of it as two sets of file contents—one called "data" and one called "rsrc". On-disk, they are both just bytestreams. The catch is that you usually store a specific structure in the resource fork—smaller chunks of data indexed by 4-byte type codes and 2-byte integer IDs. Applications on the 68K normally stored everything in the resource fork. Code, menus, dialog boxes, pictures, icons, strings, and whatever else. If you copy an old Mac application to a PC or Unix system without translation, what you got was an empty file. This meant that Mac applications had to be encoded into a single stream to be sent over the network… early on, that meant BinHex .hqx or MacBinary .bin, and later on you saw Stuffit .sit archives. That’s why these structures don’t fit into an inode—it’s like you’re trying to cram a whole goddamn file in there. The resource fork structure had internal limits that capped it at 16 MB, but you could also just treat it as a separate stream of data and make it as big as you want.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  In Unix, it's said that "Everything is a file" - i.e. that everything on the system that applications need to manage should either be actual files on disk or present themselves to the application as if they were files. This adage translated to classic MacOS becomes "Everything is a resource". The Resource Manager started out as developer cope from Bruce Horn for not having access to SmallTalk anymore[0], but turned out to completely overtake the entire Macintosh Toolbox API. Packaging everything as type-coded data with standard-ish formats meant cross-cutting concerns like localization or demand paging were brokered through the Resource Manager. All of this sounds passe today because you can just use directories and files, and have the shell present the whole application as a single object. In fact, this is what all the ex-Apple staff who moved to NeXT wound up doing, which is why OSX has directories that end in .app with a bunch of separate files instead. The reason why they couldn't do this in 1984 is very simple: the Macintosh File System (MFS) that Apple shipped had only partial folder support. To be clear, MFS did actually have folders[1], but only one directory[2] for the entire volume. What files went in which folders was stored in a separate special file that only the Finder read. There was no Toolbox support for reading folder contents, just the master directory, so applications couldn't actually put files in folders. Not even using the Toolbox file pickers. And this meant the "sane approach" NeXT and OSX took was actually impossible in the system they were developing. Resources needed to live somewhere, so they added a second bytestream to every file and used it to store something morally equivalent to another directory that only holds resources. The Resource Manager treats an MFS disk as a single pile of files that each holds a single pile of resources. [0] https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html?sort=date https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html?sort=d... [1] As in, a filesystem object that can own other filesystem objects. [2] As in, a list of filesystem objects. Though in MFS's case it's more like an inode table...
a-dub 2y ago
resource and data forks were hfs(+) features that appeared in pre-osx versions of macos. post-osx made use of the bsd fast filesystem and a rather nice unix style convention from nextstep where the on-disk representation of a .app or .pkg (which would appear as a single entity in the gui) was actually a directory tree. this would rather elegantly include ui resources as well as multiple binaries for cross platform support.
euroderf 2y ago
> Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it. Prefixing the file name with a single dot - is this a file system convention ? Or just a "good idea" ?
- ggm 2y ago
  Unix convention to hide. .Files hidden from ls unless -a used but cd .config/ works fine. It matched the use of . For "this dir" and .. for "parent dir" also hidden by default. It was in v7 on a pdp11, my first experience of Unix in 1980. Probably pre-dated that.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Oh sure. I started with v6 on a pdp-10 in 1979. And the leading dot is ingrained in my brain. But what I'm wondering about is the idea of associating (for example) "myfile.xyz" and ".myfile.xyz". I've never heard of this as a convention for associating metadata.
- mmaniac 2y ago
  Prefixing the filename with ._ is Finder convention whenever you copy metadata to a filesystem which doesn't support resource forks, like FAT32

metadat 2y ago

It's worth mentioning how to turn off the creation of .DS_Store files by default while browsing network volumes - otherwise the directory modified timestamps are updated as you browse using the Finder, which is Just Plain Terrible. https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/lvju40/comment/gpc8ils/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/lvju40/comment/gpc8i...

black_puppydog 2y ago
Personally I make sure mac users do this before they get write access to a network share. It's just a matter of common curtesy IMHO.
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  curtsy (feminine bow) -> courtesy (polite act)
  - philwelch 2y ago
    Yes, but it’s a common courtesy to perform a curtsy in the appropriate situation.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      And failure to do so might come off as curt, see?
- vetinari 2y ago
  Set up a veto on your network share (https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html#VETOFILES https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5...).
actionfromafar 2y ago
If you run Samba you can also configure Samba to just ignore such creations.

l33tman 2y ago

Maybe unrelated to this, but I noticed fairly recently that my backups from my macbook now backup seemingly randomly modified pdf and txt files all over the disk. My guess is that whenever I search for something, it decides to touch a couple of hundred files (but not ALL pdf/txt files for some reason).

thought_alarm 2y ago

> Those files should only be created if the user actually makes adjustments to the view settings or set a manual location for icons in a folder. That’s unfortunately not what happens and visiting a folder pretty much guarantees that a .DS_Store file will get created This is my number one frustration with the Finder. You can customize the look and size of individual folder windows in many interesting ways, al a the Classic Mac OS Finder, which is a really great feature. But if you blow through that same folder in a browser window then most of those customization are lost, overwritten with the settings of that browser window, even if you never change anything. What's the point of allowing all of these great customizations when they're so easily clobbered? I have a global hot key to bring up the Applications folder. I'd love to customize the look of that window, but it's pointless. Whenever I hit that hot key I have no idea what I'm going to get. It's always getting reset. By the way, the reason it does this is because the Finder has no way to set a default browser window configuration. So instead, it just leaves behind the current browser settings in each folder it visits. Super frustrating.

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dreamcompiler 2y ago
> I have a global hot key to bring up the Applications folder Not global, but as long as you're in the Finder cmd-shift-A opens the Applications folder. cmd-shift-U opens the Utilities folder.
mzs 2y ago
It used to be before darwin that every open folder corresponded to one window and there was only one user, so that approach worked. I really miss that, it was nice having the same window pop to the front with everything just like you last had it before.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Not to mention that it's an obnoxious and incompetent design. Look at the fact that Mac OS litters every other computer it visits with turds, for its own (and in fact only one user's) benefit. It's doubly stupid because the next browsing Mac that comes along trounces the previous one's turd. If Apple wanted to store view settings for remote volumes (or even local volumes), the competent design would have been to store them locally (and per user) in a central location on the machine doing the browsing. I remember the promised re-write of Finder and thought it never happened. Nothing seems to have improved for the user. I could post a list of decades-old defects that persist today. The one thing I can think of that has finally been fixed (and this was long after the "rewrite") was that you can now finally sort the file list properly: with folders at the top. Now I wish someone would explain something that might actually be worse than DS-turds: the presence of a "Contents" subdirectory in every goddamned Apple package. I mean... who thought you needed to create a directory called "Contents" to hold the contents of the parent directory? It's mind-boggling.

threeseed 2y ago
> the competent design would have been to store them locally (and per user) in a central location on the machine doing the browsing Not sure but it could be the case that when you mount a network drive there isn't a stable identifier that can be used to track it.
- organsnyder 2y ago
  Sure, that wouldn't work if the network volume was accessed by different URIs. But it would work in 95% of cases, which is good enough.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Exactly. And if the same machine used two URIs, there'd simply be two entries for settings. And the settings cache could flush old entries periodically.
  - nullindividual 2y ago

Waterluvian 2y ago

DS Store seems so unfortunate. Yes it serves a purpose. Yes you can work around it in various ways. But the reality is that it’s basically proliferated file litter to 99% of people who come across it. It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish. Growing up with both System 7.5 / OSX, and windows machines, the Macs never seemed inclined to make me see extraneous files, filetypes, and other “how the computer works” implementation details. It’s just so odd to my mental model of it all to see this file end up everywhere.

DEADMINCE 2y ago
> It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish. Apple's polish has always been more about the surface then the internals.
- userbinator 2y ago
  I remember playing around with setting up a Hackintosh, and found all those errors in the system logs --- then realised that an actual working Mac generates much the same (ignorable) errors.
  - plasticeagle 2y ago
    To be fair to Apple here, so does every other operating system. Linux system logs are filled with errors too. In general, keeping the logs of even a moderately complex application "clean" - so that the only errors logged are real errors, in some poorly defined meaning of "real" - is very hard. For operating systems it must be straight up impossible.
    - popcalc 2y ago
      It's difficult to accept as competency when they control both the software and hardware.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > Linux system logs are filled with errors too. Mostly only due to misbehaving hardware. Something that should really not happen on a Mac. And "filled" is way hyperbolic, there usually isn't a lot of it.

java-man 2y ago

Also there are those dot underscore files. Is there any way to disable creating these files on the network shares? [0] https://superuser.com/questions/212896/is-there-any-way-to-prevent-a-mac-from-creating-dot-underscore-files https://superuser.com/questions/212896/is-there-any-way-to-p...

yellow_postit 2y ago

Finder remains one of those apps I still can’t make effective use of. Windows File Explorer for all its warts and changes still “just makes sense” to my brain vs how finder lays things out and expects you to browse. I’ve long since moved to command line or dual pane explorers but it’s something that makes me pause every time I do find myself in Finder for some reason.

eek2121 2y ago
Oh boy, Windows does the same thing (regarding hidden files to sort out FS stuff), but they hide it (just like Apple). We WSL2 users found out the hard way and Microsoft refuses to offer a solution. Relevant issue: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456 Apologies for my post getting snipped, The latest iOS beta keeps randomly eating my text. Apple is aware.
- 0l 2y ago
  Unless im misunderstanding something, these files don't actually exist but reside in the NTFS's alternative data stream, and only display separately in WSL due to ext4 not supporting ADS right?
  - pasc1878 2y ago
    Which then is the same with Apple's ._ files Unix file systems are not sufficient, you need a layer on top.
deleted 2y ago
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climb_stealth 2y ago
I wholly agree with you on this one. Windows has its fair share of issues, but Windows Explorer feels like peak file browsing to me. For MacOS I can recommend Forklift [0]. I've been using it for years and it is a bit closer to the Windows Explorer way of doing things. Does what it is meant to do. Affordable. No nags. Gets out of the way. Not perfect, but soooo much better than the horrific experience that is Finder. [0] https://binarynights.com/ https://binarynights.com/

slmjkdbtl 2y ago

I remember there used to ways to turn off the creation of .DS_Store but they removed it, I can't figure out for life why they would make such a change. I had to write a program [0] to watch the entire file system and delete .DS_Store as soon as they're created. [0] https://github.com/slmjkdbtl/dskill https://github.com/slmjkdbtl/dskill

gumby 2y ago
Why? I just ignore them.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  Some people can't.
- prurigro 2y ago
  Google sent a copyright violation notice for each .DS_Store anyone at my company uploaded to Drive for nearly a year (yes, many support tickets were filed). It wasn't Apple's fault, but it still would have been nice if there was a way to turn them off.
  - heavyset_go 2y ago
    That's scary considering how willingly they'll shutdown accounts for tripping their automated copyright violation service.
    - prurigro 2y ago
      For sure! I made sure to have an open ticket with them until it was resolved so I'd have someone to call if some other automated system decided to shut down our services for it.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Why? Somehow DS_Store is claimed as a copyrighted file?

Ruq 2y ago

Every time I see it I think Nintendo DS.

KingLancelot 2y ago

[dead]

dada78641 2y ago

> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch. Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances. I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

esprehn 2y ago
They did apparently rewrite it in Cocoa back in ~2008. Although that was 16 years ago so I'm sure it's accumulated a fair bit of tech debt since then.
meindnoch 2y ago
Based on how well the System Preferences → Settings rewrite went: please don't.
DEADMINCE 2y ago
>The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing Say what you will about Windows, but the Explore file manager has always been pretty rock solid.
- al_borland 2y ago
  I will say, network drives feel local on Windows. On macOS they feel like network drives. I think I’d say the same about external drives. I stopped using them, because I got sick of waiting for them to spin up anytime Finder had to do some work.
- seabird 2y ago

sherburt3 2y ago

I am MacOS's biggest fanboy and Tim Cook's strongest soldier but I will also say the Finder is one of the dumbest file explorers I've ever experienced in my life

DEADMINCE 2y ago
> I am MacOS's biggest fanboy and Tim Cook's strongest soldier wow.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
spopejoy 2y ago
I like many things about Mac OS but I do wonder about the quality of the low-level software engineering. The preponderance of bespoke NIH is glaring: filesystems, network protocols, "resource forks" (this one goes WAY back to pascal-OS days). Given that OS X was a significant rewrite and embrace of Posix, it's a mystery why they wouldn't have gone further with this. I think the lack of a mature server OS reflects this. Single-user allows for a lot of workarounds, but a true multiuser runtime can't be hipster for its own sake.

seabass 2y ago

Never understood why it had to be in the same folder. Can’t the os have its own little db somewhere that has a reference to each path?

stereo 2y ago
The idea was that metadata, for example a file’s label, would travel across to whichever device you use the network drive from.
- jojobas 2y ago
  Yeah, because such devices are only made by Apple and can or should understand Apple's internal format.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  But classic Mac OS stored “Desktop DB” and “Desktop DF” at the root of each mounted drive, IIRC. It seems like a better solution.
neerajsi 2y ago
Putting in in the folder is also nice in that it naturally gets deleted when the folder is deleted
- earthboundkid 2y ago
  All file operations have been watched by Spotlight since forever at this point.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    Except for ignored file types and folders you marked as private.
    - vetinari 2y ago
      Or those on network volumes or removable media. When somebody else on other machine removes them, your local database is out of sync pronto.

deldelaney 2y ago

I miss the old Pre-OSX finder that could accomplish copy files without opening a second window and dragging into. I'll never get how some rocket scientist (IVIE I suspect) removed Apple's best finder feature, colored file folders, which made for easy sorting. To make matters worse, added stupid dot labels instead. What a cluster. Oh well. Still a bad day on a Mac is better than a great day in Windows.

pasc1878 2y ago
See John Siracusa"S comments on Finder https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

hoherd 2y ago

FYI there is a tool on macOS called `dot_clean` that will "Remove dot-underscore files" https://ss64.com/mac/dot_clean.html https://ss64.com/mac/dot_clean.html

kaladin-jasnah 2y ago

There's also the .fseventsd directory which I've also seen on non-UNIX systems.

ee99ee 2y ago

Most informative post ever on Hacker News. Now I know!

tripdout 2y ago

Why doesn't Windows need such a directory to store folder customizations in Explorer?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
steve1977 2y ago
Explorer uses a hidden desktop.ini file for this.
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  Negative. desktop.ini doesn't get edited when you switch (for example) from Details to List. Also, I think only the desktop allows moving icons around freely.
  - steve1977 2y ago
    I guess a more correct answer would have been that deskop.ini is used for some folder customizations.
  - reddalo 2y ago
    > only the desktop allows moving icons around freely I'm pretty sure Windows used to allow you to move icons around, I clearly remember making a mess on some Windows 98 folders. Maybe they removed that feature recently?
    - IIsi50MHz 2y ago
      Windows stores/stored in the registry a limited number of file folders' icon layouts. Once you go over the limit, the oldest config is erased. I think the original limit was 200, but could be overridden using a registry key.

gregmac 2y ago

As a non-Mac user, I always find it somewhat annoying when I download some .tgz published on Github or something and find .DS_Store littered inside. I guess macos probably just uses GNU tar? It's kind of surprising it wasn't modified or configured by default to ignore .DS_Store.

willsmith72 2y ago
Ah that reminds me I committed a few last week and never cleaned it up..
- tekknik 2y ago
  Global ignore.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
> It's kind of surprising it wasn't modified or configured by default to ignore .DS_Store. It was, but not by default. If you export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true then tar will skip .DS_Store files.
sneed_chucker 2y ago
Most of Mac's Unix utils come straight from FreeBSD without any special sauce from Apple.
- leptons 2y ago
  They had the chance to get rid of DS_store, but they put it in MacOS anyway?
  - pasc1878 2y ago
    er. as the article says - it was created for OSX and not classic macOs
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Apple patches most of their utilities. This is frequently annoying when trying to track down what they did :)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rkachowski 2y ago

> Internally, those two components were known as Finder_FE and Finder_BE (Frontend and Backend). Interesting to see that apps were split into front and back end (indeed, I'm surprised even that the terms existed) back in 1999.

pasc1878 2y ago
Why are you surprised? I have been writing client server apps since the late 80s. Originally a central DB and a PC front end. But the server could be doing business processing e.g. feeds and processing of stock prices. Client Server predates the web.

workfromspace 2y ago

When I saw `DS_store` inside the title, my eyes automatically filtered out and ignored that word for few seconds. I had to re-read. That's how I see these files. And maybe one day, we can have and edit our own .gitignore -like files for such Inattentional blindness[0]. [0]: Inattentional blindness

nanna 2y ago

Thankfully Emacs's file manager Dired lets me easily pretend this pesky little file, as well as those produced by a LaTeX run, doesn't exist. (setq dired-omit-mode t dired-omit-files "^.+\\.\$DS_Store\\|aux\\|bak\\|bbl\\|bcf\\|blg\\|dvi\\|ent\\|idx\\|ilg\\|ind\\|log\\|orig\\|out\\|pdf-view-restore\\|pdf#\\|reg\\|run.xml\\|synctex.gz\\|toc\$$")

thiht 2y ago
"easily" you say?
- nanna 2y ago
  Well sure it's a bit noisy but it's just a bit of regex.

wodenokoto 2y ago

Whenever I move a file from windows into WSL via explorer I get a Zone file. I assume it’s the same things but quite annoying.

webwielder2 2y ago

> For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch. I would think that the file manager for an entirely separate operating system being written from scratch would be a foregone conclusion.

SoftTalker 2y ago
NeXT OS had a perfectly good file manager/GUI, but I guess it was pretty different from what Mac users were used to.

wirrbel 2y ago

What's really astonishing is that no one at apple dared to fix the bug that creates these files...

sweeter 2y ago

I bought a secondhand Macbook M2 and I was genuinely shocked at how awful Finder is (no offense to this guy) it sort of reminds me of the Android file manager that hides directories and files and tells you that "you can't do that, you cant just use a folder!" That was really off putting. I ended up installing Asahi despite getting the Mac to have access to the awful apps that I can't get on Linux like MS Word and photoshop. I hate this landscape tbh.

demondemidi 2y ago

Funny all the people complaining about “this makes Mac ugly compared to Linux” meanwhile every Linux tool I install craps dotfiles not only in ~/ but in working folders as well. It’s a fact of life that tens of thousands of smart programmers realized is necessary.

k4rli 2y ago
Every Linux tool? Simply not true. Most tools keep it in a ~ subdir like ~/.config MacOS creates a junk file/folder just by visiting any folder. It's not comparable.
- tekknik 2y ago
  Any linux desktop environment is going to do the same, as the DE will need to store previews and thumbnails amongst other things. Except on a linux machine this data would be stored in some other location that you’ll have to lookup and find.
- demondemidi 2y ago
  You're right, I didn't mean 100% of all linux tools, like coreutils. But every piece of linux software I've purchased a license for does exactly this. I think people that get upset about this just need something to fret about, at least in my experience. They probably trim their speaker cables to the same length to match impedence, too.

bimguy 2y ago

Rixsteps take on .DS_Store - a much more enjoyable read. https://rixstep.com/1/20030521,00.shtml https://rixstep.com/1/20030521,00.shtml And a follow up article - https://rixstep.com/2/20061212,00.shtml https://rixstep.com/2/20061212,00.shtml

paulcapewell 2y ago

See also: 'look for (nearly) empty directories and delete them' - https://alexwlchan.net/2024/emptydir/ https://alexwlchan.net/2024/emptydir/