Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths
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@dreikin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@masonwheeler said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
I'm seeing a lot of gnus in here. That appears to be a recurring theme.
I recall hearing at one point that the reason Microsoft created the "Program Files" folder as the default location for installed programs was specifically to force developers to write software that could properly handle spaces in paths.
Which I assume is why Qt and some drivers like to unpack/install into C:\ instead of somewhere sensible.
Which is particularly impressive because Qt is an otherwise pretty nice toolkit for platform independent software. Yet I remember 10 years ago I thought "why didn't they fix this 10 years ago".
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@gurth said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
For maximum
cross-platformwankery, consider BlenderFTFY. In order to preserve what sanity I have left, Blender ranks very high on my list of “never use except possibly in life-or-death situations” software.
But one thing it doesn't support is UNC paths. You have to map a drive letter to \\server\share and use that drive letter. But it doesn't have a button to do that mapping, so you have to go to Explorer or the command line or something and do it.
Handy. I wonder if I still have it on my computer, or whether I chucked it into the trash after my last attempt at getting anything useful out of it … Hmm, by the looks of it, the latter, so I can’t see if it does similar ery on macOS.
Blender is one of these things I've always wanted to learn because it looks like it's immensely powerful. But the user interface is even worse than GIMP's. I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun yet I had to google how to draw a rectangle. More than once.
They're not simply too stupid/stubborn to use the shell's open file dialog, even the right click context menus aren't native. I shudder when I see that stuff.
I guess they argue it's for "portability" reasons, but it's a severe case of NIH. The amount of platform specific hacks in that file dialog must be far larger than simply calling GetOpenFileName.
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@arantor said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@bulb so can we do, like unicode_real_string where we do actually define every character in a single master list without any of this basic/extended nonsense?
For graphemes, mostly yes. Just forget the legacy definition ever existed and use the extended.
There are still all the different levels of equivalence and such though. Because Latin alphabet is simple. Others, not so much.
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@bulb well, always internally use the normalised form, so instead of letter plus combined accent, just store the accented letter.
The most awkward use case that this currently breaks AFAIK is the combination character emoji E.g. with skin tints.
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@arantor said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
well, always internally use the normalised form, so instead of letter plus combined accent, just store the accented letter.
Most scripts beyond Latin, Cyrillic and Greek don't have composed form.
Also, it is often needed to be normalization-preserving, because you may be communicating with something that does more or less normalization than you. There are two levels of normalization—normal and kompatibility and then there are many more special annotations in the composition column of the character database that various programs may or may not be using. And a lot of software, that simply treats utf-8 as unknown extension to ascii.
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@arantor … and then you build on MacOS and collide with the filesystem that normalizes, but to the decomposed form. That causes quite a bit of trouble exactly because most programs tend to prefer composed form (where it exists).
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@topspin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
Blender is one of these things I've always wanted to learn because it looks like it's immensely powerful.
It does look like it, but its learning curve is so ridiculously steep that I have given up on each attempt I’ve made to get anything useable out of that program.
But the user interface is even worse than GIMP's. I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun yet I had to google how to draw a rectangle. More than once.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used GIMP, but was the solution to select a rectangular area and fill it? That’s basically the way you do it in Photoshop as well (unless you like using vector art in Photoshop, which is a whole in itself because it never seems to work the way you want — until it suddenly does).
They're not simply too stupid/stubborn to use the shell's open file dialog, even the right click context menus aren't native. I shudder when I see that stuff.
I guess they argue it's for "portability" reasons, but it's a severe case of NIH. The amount of platform specific hacks in that file dialog must be far larger than simply calling GetOpenFileName.They’re just trying to show off.
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@arantor You could, but you'd end up writing is an interface an array of bytes or words that abstracts away the fact that - regardless what representation you choose, including UTF32 - your graphemes, what humans think of as "characters", are variable length, even after normalization.
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From experience, the first problem with variable-length encodings arises when for some reason or other (usually storage space) you have to truncate a string after an arbitrary length. There you run into the issue of possibly truncating in the middle of a character.
But I guess even in UCS-4, you could end up truncating in the middle of a character's diacritics.
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@medinoc Truncating an UTF-8 string on a character boundary isn't that complicated either. Just count the number of
c & 0xC0 == 0x80
bytes at the end of the sequence, and check if that matches the expectation from the byte before that. If it mismatches, truncate at that byte.
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Also, I recently found out OpenCV, after all these years, can't handle non-Latin characters on your typical Western install of Windows.
More specifically, its loading functions have no wide-character overload, and they all call the basic
fopen()
internally. Which isn't a problem on unixey platforms that allow the current locale to use the UTF-8 encoding, but we all know Windows is prevented from doing that by the burden of compatibility (which unixey types don't care about).To add insult to injury, in the version of OpenCV our software is linked to (OpenCV v2.4.5) I couldn't find a way to load an image from a byte array either (and frankly I'm not sure there's one in the current version, either).
All of this means that in order to do our OpenCV processing on images with non-Windows-1252 names (which can be on read-only storage), I had to make a local temporary copy with a "sanitized" (and thread-ID'd) name just so I could load the pictures for processing...
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@pleegwat I think you're still confusing code points with characters (=graphemes).
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@asdf said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@pleegwat I think you're still confusing code points with characters (=graphemes).
That said, so was I.
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@asdf said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@pleegwat I think you're still confusing code points with characters (=graphemes).
If you don't mind truncating in the middle of a word or digraph, then why would you care about truncating in the middle of a grapheme?
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@grunnen said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@asdf said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@pleegwat I think you're still confusing code points with characters (=graphemes).
If you don't mind truncating in the middle of a word or digraph, then why would you care about truncating in the middle of a grapheme?
It all depends on what you are doing and what your users expect. If you're going to use the string as (part of) a file system path, you should not be truncating at all ever.
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@gurth said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@topspin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
But the user interface is even worse than GIMP's. I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun yet I had to google how to draw a rectangle. More than once.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used GIMP, but was the solution to select a rectangular area and fill it? That’s basically the way you do it in Photoshop as well (unless you like using vector art in Photoshop, which is a whole in itself because it never seems to work the way you want — until it suddenly does).
Almost. It was to select a rectangle, then "stroke path" or "stroke selection". Which is awesome from a programmer's point of view, because you can draw much more general kind of things. As a user, well fuck that. I can open MS Paint and simply drag a rectangle in 2 seconds.
They're not simply too stupid/stubborn to use the shell's open file dialog, even the right click context menus aren't native. I shudder when I see that stuff.
I guess they argue it's for "portability" reasons, but it's a severe case of NIH. The amount of platform specific hacks in that file dialog must be far larger than simply calling GetOpenFileName.They’re just trying to show off.
Maybe that they don't care about your color scheme. Or fonts. Or screen readers, or who knows what else they square-wheeled.
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@topspin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun
In about the same way that you can produce any image in the world using just Paint, if you go pixel by pixel.
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@topspin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun yet I had to google how to draw a rectangle.
If you can't figure out how to draw a rectangle, then GIMP can't do everything under the sun. It can't even draw a rectangle. If you have a million features, but nobody can figure out how to access them, you actually have zero features.
The UI is the program.
Every open source developer needs that physically hammered into their foreheads with 10" railroad spikes.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
It can't even draw a rectangle.
It can: you select a rectangular area, then apply a stroke to the selection.
Yes, it's retarded.
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@raceprouk said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
It can: you select a rectangular area, then apply a stroke to the selection.
Look at my point being missed. Gaze upon it.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@raceprouk said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
It can: you select a rectangular area, then apply a stroke to the selection.
Look at my point being missed. Gaze upon it.
To be fair, you "missed" my point too, as you basically said exactly what I complained about. It's retarded if even Paint can do it better.
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@topspin the problem isn't that GIMP can or cannot do something, it's that it's a shitfest of UI to drive it to do what you want because it can do it.
A subtle but very important distinction that most OSS folks forget.
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@raceprouk said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
It can: you select a rectangular area, then apply a stroke to the selection.
Yes, it's retarded.
Still better than Photoshop’s handling of vectors, where you draw a rectangle with the appropriate tool and then apply a stroke. But whether or not said rectangle will remain in the image if you draw another one, will become part of another bit of vector art you drew, or something else unexpected seems to be based on
INT(RND() * 5)
.
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@gurth I didn't use vectors that much in Photoshop, but I think that like everything else, layers are the key.
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@gurth IIRC there are also vector-based shapes which use un-rasterized layers (until you rasterize them of course), which are separate from paths and show up in the layer window. But it's been a while since I've used Photoshop, and even longer since I've done anything with shapes or paths.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@topspin said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
I'm pretty sure GIMP can do everything under the sun yet I had to google how to draw a rectangle.
If you can't figure out how to draw a rectangle, then GIMP can't do everything under the sun. It can't even draw a rectangle. If you have a million features, but nobody can figure out how to access them, you actually have zero features.
The UI is the program.
Every open source developer needs that physically hammered into their foreheads with 10" railroad spikes.
This. One of the guys that reviewed our product complained about the lack of permanent inventory.
It's accessed by holding down the context menu, but since we don't have a tutorial yet, it's definitely not obvious...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
holding down the context menu
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@zecc said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
Holding down the right mouse button in order to access the context menu, I would assume. (Then again, you know what happens when you assume... paging @accalia for obligatory exchange.)
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@zecc said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
holding down the context menu
Sorry, I a word there. @heterodox is correct, but it's not the right mouse button (that was the assumptions. :D )
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@tsaukpaetra Was the missing word "key"? As in "context menu key"?
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Side note, in a potential move to get themselves off of this list, Epic is doing a thing!
http://coconutlizard.co.uk/blog/ue4/solongmaxpath/
Oh wait, that's just file name path... Well, shoot. Looks like they're still on it! :D
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@zecc said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@tsaukpaetra Was the missing word "key"? As in "context menu key"?
button. It's not necessarily a "key".... (yes I'm being obtuse (i think))
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@heterodox said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
Holding down the right mouse button in order to access the context menu, I would assume.
The contextual menu appears regardless of its triggering mechanism. Right-click is only one triggering mechanism. The context menu key on the keyboard is another. I think a lot of touchscreens do hold two fingers, etc. Mac Classic used Command-left click, IIRC.
If anybody says "right-click menu", you can kick them.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
The contextual menu appears regardless of its triggering mechanism.
Yes, yes.
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@heterodox said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
The contextual menu appears regardless of its triggering mechanism.
Yes, yes.
What would you say if I told you that one of the context menus was received by placing your hand inside of someone else?
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@tsaukpaetra Is that Zigbee or some other IoT hipster thing?
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@greybeard said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@tsaukpaetra Is that Zigbee or some other IoT hipster thing?
No, it's one way to interact with other players in our VR product.
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@tsaukpaetra Well, @Perverted_Vixen won't have any problems drawing rectangles in your product.
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@greybeard said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
@tsaukpaetra Well, @Perverted_Vixen won't have any problems drawing rectangles in your product.
I'll ask my lead if we can send her a key! :D
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
I think a lot of touchscreens do hold two fingers, etc
On Windows, I press a single finger and hold.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
What would you say if I told you that one of the context menus was received by placing your hand inside of someone else?
I used to use the hand-in-box method but it takes too long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A54yfyi00dI
But at least it proves I can control my instincts.
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@blakeyrat looks like an interesting movie...
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@tsaukpaetra Lynch's Dune is an interesting film but whether it's a good film is a hotly debated topic, especially amongst fans of the books...
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@arantor It's an incredible film in a lot of ways, but it's an terrible adaptation of Dune.
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@blakeyrat can't argue with that assessment.
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@blakeyrat said in Big list of software that cannot handle spaces or accents in paths:
The contextual menu appears regardless of its triggering mechanism. Right-click is only one triggering mechanism. The context menu key on the keyboard is another. I think a lot of touchscreens do hold two fingers, etc. Mac Classic used Command-left click, IIRC.
If anybody says "right-click menu", you can kick them.
Not only do I call it the right-click menu, I call the key the right-click key.
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@medinoc I call the button on the right hand side of the mouse the contextual menu button, and the action of clicking it contextual menu clicking
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@jaloopa IIRC, the 3-button Acorn mouse had buttons called Select, Menu, and Adjust (left to right).
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Visual Studio 2015
I downloaded a demo website and extracted the archive into this folder:
C:\Users\[username]\Downloads\C# Site
.
VS refused to open it via File > Open > Website. Didn't even error: just flatly refused to open it.I changed the path to
C:\Users\[username]\Downloads\Site
VS opened it fine.