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Heck, on Windows I couldn't even rename audio/video files when playing them in an app, but I can on macOS, without anything crashing (except some stubborn Windows-logic apps like VLC which will fail to replay something from its playlist that has since been renamed, but at least on macOS it will still allow you to rename or move the files while they're being played.)

It's small details like these that make so much difference in daily convenience.



I think a general purpose UX should err on the side of "make it difficult for non-technical users to make mistakes"

Renaming/Deleting files in use is one of those things that us nerds like to complain about, but it makes sense when you think of an accountant that has an open spreadsheet and accidentally deletes a folder with that file. For average non-technical people (on any OS) I would say it makes sense to block that file from being deleted.


I see you’ve never actually experienced it? It is actually more intuitive for the average user, as the file name is updated across every application immediately. In fact, you can actually change the file name from the top of the window directly.


I have experienced this many times in MacOS after deleting a file/folder and replacing it with some other version, like one downloaded from an email. After a while, I realize that I'm working from ~/.Trash and the attachment I just sent didn't include the changes I had been making for the last hour.

I've had this happen in bash also, where I modify some script in an external editor then try to run it, only to realize that I'm running from the trash, even though the bash prompt naively tells me I'm in ~/SomethingNotTrashFolder.

Intuitive would be "Hey, this file you're working on was just moved to the trash. There's a 99.9999% chance you don't want to do this." rather than hoping the filepath is visible, and noticed by dumb chance, in the title bar, since not many people periodically glance at the file they have open to verify it's still the file they want open.


How does the user know that the file is open? Also, Is it consistent across network folder renames too?


No idea, if the OS design plays into this or if it's just a application design convention, but on desktop Linux how it often works (for example with KDE programs) is that if a program has a file open which was moved (including moved to the trash), then the program will pop open a little persistent notification with a button offering to save the content that you still have in the program to the location where the file used to be, effectively allowing you to recover from such mistakes without hindering you from moving/deleting the file.




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