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Comment by eadmund

4 days ago

Anything with a capital letter requires hitting two keys: Shift and then the desired letter. Thus /Programs requires 10 keystrokes rather than 9. Even worse, since the capital letter is at the beginning of the directory name, I have to type it and am unable to rely on tab-completion.

/Programs with its ten keystrokes is over twice the keystrokes of /bin and its four. Short names are quicker to type and require less effort. Given that to a first approximation I spend my entire life typing on a keyboard, I very much wish to optimise that experience.

That's really more the fault of the tab completion. There's no reason why it couldn't complete `prog` to `Programs`. It's just Unix tradition that they don't. I would prefer if they did.

  • In ~/.inputrc, add

        set completion-ignore-case on
    

    to enable case insensitive tab completion in bash.

    • Great tip! Apparently that's readline's config file, so this will affect a lot of things. That's great news for me; after switching to zsh I got used to case-insensitive tab completion, and now it annoys me when other tools don't work that way. This should help a lot.

Your problem is solved by naming the thing /programs, instead. End of the world using full words, I tell ya!