Thread

I notice in a lot of open source software, such as 3rd party codeigniter stuff, people don’t put a file extension on their README files.  No “.txt” or anything.  From my understanding, this way of doing things comes from the old days of Unix.  Is this correct?  Is there any legitimate reason that it’s still done this way?  Or is it more about 1337 cred, and “sticking it” to us Windows users?

I hate when people do that, if you don’t like .txt, go for .nfo or something like that, so OS can assign default behavior for the file.

Nothing to do with sticking it to anyone, it’s just an old system that everyone has stuck to.

Thanks to things like GitHub lots of people are starting to use README.md or README.textile, but that of course is just as busted for Windows users.

Nothing to do with sticking it to anyone, it’s just an old system that everyone has stuck to.

Thanks to things like GitHub lots of people are starting to use README.md or README.textile, but that of course is just as busted for Windows users.

Not really, Windows will ask once which program to use to open it and then you’re good. Now if the file doesn’t have an extension, then it will ask each time (AFAIK).

Fair enough, not used Windows in a LONG time.  😏

I notice in a lot of open source software, such as 3rd party codeigniter stuff, people don’t put a file extension on their README files.  No “.txt” or anything.  From my understanding, this way of doing things comes from the old days of Unix.  Is this correct?  Is there any legitimate reason that it’s still done this way?  Or is it more about 1337 cred, and “sticking it” to us Windows users?

You have it backwards. There is no such thing as a file extension. Well not in MacOSX, Unix or Linux anyway. Since these OS’es are smart enough to figure out what type of file it is on their own (by analysing a file header), they did not need to add some form of identifying description.

File extension is a behemoth from the MS-DOS days, that Windows adapted to be ‘backwards compatible’. If anything, a file extension is Windows users sticking it to the rest of the OS’es in the world proclaiming: ‘look my file system is so stupid that i can’t understand wth this file is without you explicitly telling me!’.

Thanks old guy! 😜

You have it backwards. There is no such thing as a file extension. Well not in MacOSX, Unix or Linux anyway. Since these OS’es are smart enough to figure out what type of file it is on their own (by analysing a file header), they did not need to add some form of identifying description.

But doesn’t it make sense to have file extensions? For example, if your project dir is filled with .html, .xml, .php, .log files, wouldn’t you want to see these extensions rather than just file names? Same for music, video, image files.

The sense that you are talking about is that the file extensions gives meta info about what program should be used to open them. For instance in your example, ‘.html, .xml, .php and .log’ are all text files. They can all be opened by a text editor which is implied. So adding a .txt extension is redundant. You wouldn’t name your files index.txt.php would you? Or index.txt.html ?

Of course there is nothing wrong with adding the .txt explicitly, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it ‘should’ be done.

Thanks for the info guys.  I noticed on Github many projects use .md markdown files, which are just text files, with creative formatting.  I did it for one of my own projects, and it works great, because github turns the markdown formatting into spiffy looking HTML.  It’s perfectly readable without that though.  Since it has an extension, it’s windows friendly, as the extension can be assigned to a program like Notepad++.  I think I’ll be using this format for my projects in the future, or as long as I’m on github.