Noodlings

An issue I’ve been dealing with is displaying a file path to the user. While this may be strongly discouraged (anyone have a cite from official Apple documents?), you have to admit that having a compact visual representation is useful at times.

With OS X being a collision of sorts between UNIX and the older Mac OS, there are two ways most programmers would conceive of a file path. The UNIX way would use slashes (/) with no drive at the root. In the Mac OS way, you’d have a drive at the root and colons (:) to separate the parts of the path. It was my impression that colons were on the way out but at the same time UNIX paths did not seem appropriate for regular users.

Trying to find examples in OS X itself, you find that inklings of both appear depending on where you look. For instance, doing “Get Info” on a file in Finder gives you the UNIX path. Command-clicking on the title of the Finder window gives you a pop up of all the ancestors of the currently shown file in the more Mac OS style (it shows the drive). The open and save panels have the same thing in the pop-up up top. No colons though.

Things get a bit more interesting when English is not your primary language. Set Spanish as your primary language in System Preferences and look at your sidebar. Notice anything different? Common folders are now translated. “Music” is now “Música”. “Movies” is now “Películas”. You no longer have a Desktop, you have an Escritorio. Now, this isn’t the problem (for programmers) that you think it is in terms of having to localize references to these paths. Just jump into Terminal or even do a “Get Info” on the file and you see the same UNIX path you’d see if everything were in English. These translations only exist to the user. That said, it would be nice when displaying a path to use the one the user would most likely understand so UNIX paths are out.

Now, let’s look at NSFileManager. There are two methods for getting a display version of a path:

– displayNameAtPath:
– componentsToDisplayForPath:

The odd thing here is that you cannot get a string with the whole path. -displayNameAtPath: only returns a translation of the last path component. -componentsToDisplayForPath: returns an array of the components. In both cases, they skirt the issue of what to use as a path separator.

In the current version of Hazel, I punted and just used what was shown in “Get Info”, which is the UNIX path (BTW, to show the full path in Hazel, just hover your mouse over a folder). Recently, though I caught Finder in the act of displaying a path.

Try this: drag a file into that space in the Finder window between the toolbar buttons and the search field. For those that don’t know about this feature, it’s basically a place where you can stick files that you can quickly access later. For you NeXTSTEP people, it’s a poor man’s shelf.

Now hover your mouse over the file on the “shelf”. There it is. Not a slash. Not a colon. The path separator is a triangle pointing right (▸). That’s unicode character 0x25B8, for those keeping score at home. You can see this somewhat echoed in Finder when you do a search. When you click on one of the results, you get that nifty path widget at the bottom with different triangles, but triangles nonetheless.

So is this standard? Dunno, but it’s good enough for my purposes and I’ve stuck it in the next version of Hazel (I’ve also added a contextual “Reveal in Finder” menu item for those that want to view the folder in context in Finder). If you see file paths popping up anywhere else, let me know.