HFS+ is probably the worst filesystem in common use right now; even FAT has the benefit of simplicity. Most of its issues, however, are with its horrific imple

HFS+ is probably the worst filesystem in common use right now; even FAT has the benefit of simplicity. Most of its issues, however, are with its horrific implementation; the Unicode naming is kind of bad but Linus manages to be wrong about several things. Regarding case sensitivity: it is generally accepted among the user interface crowd that (Western) users don't really understand that 'C' and 'c' are different things; they're "both" 'c'. Case-preserving is thus the accepted practice. However case manipulation is not an operation that can be done absent a locale; my go to example here is that 'i' upcases to 'I' unless you're a Turk in which case it upcases to 'İ'. Similar although not quite as bad is the fact that 'ß' upcases to 'ẞ' U+1E9E in some exotic circumstances; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ẞ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ẞ for details. Similar limitations apply to sorting, which users also expect. Regarding Unicode: NFD is a normalization format; it converts 'é' U+00E9 and 'é' U+0065 U+0301--which are semantically identical--into the same coding. As it happens NFD picks U+0065 U+0301 for that string; NFC picks U+00E9. Any time there is ambiguity, NF[CD] will retain the original ordering. Calling it "destroying user data" is meaningless histrionics. Most of the time we tend to use NFC. I am told that NFD has certain advantages for sorting, where one might want to match the French word 'être' with the search string 'etre'; in NFC this requires large equivalence tables but in NFD the root character is the same in both cases. Linus's claim 'Even the people who think normalization is a good thing admit that NFD is a bad format, and certainly not for data exchange.' has a big [citation needed] tag attached. As it happens, my personal belief is the following: Given that users expect case sensitivity and locale specific ordering, which complicate filesystem design tremendously. Given that users mostly interact with the system through GUI dialogs, which already hide system files (files with the hidden bit in HFS+, or files starting with '.'). Therefore, extract the case sensitivity to a layer, used by the GUI, which can understand the user's locale and so fold case properly. This layer should be available to command line applications so that they can use the same rules if they so choose. The underlying filesystem will then be case insensitive, but is still used to encode Unicode data; the right thing to do here is to normalize. Either NFC or NFD is fine, really. For pedants: the related NFKC/NFKD forms add a canonicalization step and are absolutely not semantically safe in any way, for all that they're useful for sorting.