News Microsoft opens up the exFAT filesystem

Hopefully coming to a Nokia Android One phone near me at some point...

 

That's nice... but when is Windows going to join the late 90's and support escaped characters in file folder names?
I say 90's as this is when I became aware of the restriction in Windows/DOS having previously only really used Apple computers.

 

Hopefully NEVER.
I firmly believe that if we aren't going to completely break the existing path structure and command parsing, then illegal characters should stay illegal. It avoids weird parsing issues. I happen to think that allowing space, -, and more than one . in file names is already too far. (The period, I admit, doesn't actually causes any parsing issues I can think of. )
At the least, I think that if you're going to make the reserved characters legal in file names, you also have to MANDATE quote marks around the complete file path and name. For ALL files, regardless of whether they use a reserved character.


Now, reserved names I am all for dumping in the trash. But Microsoft's rather conservative in some respects, and tries very hard not to break things for businesses running software last updated when MS-DOS 4 was new. They made a mistake when developing MS-DOS 2's directory support and will NEVER fix it.

 

I have never had any issues under Linux or Mac (per and post Carbon) file systems with file/folder names using any and all characters that can be typed on a keyboard. The only issue I have ever had is under windows when a stray space is added to the end of the file name.
This isn't a big issue and mostly only impacts media files, for example I would prefer file the name to be "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and not "Spider-Man Homecoming", or "Spider-Man - Homecoming" as the last two are not the movie title. Oh and I am also a supported of meta data file types not filename extension defined data types.

 

I've not tried it recently (and have no intention to do so) but starting a filename with a '-' used to cause all sorts of fun in Linux.

While I find the character limits in Windows annoying on occasion (eg: Mint used to default to naming screenshots with a timestamp containing ':', which it would happily allow you to copy to a FAT/NTFS device and turn Windows into a hot mess; again, haven't checked recently whether it still does) they generally make sense and are a lot more lenient than they used to be.