Deciding on a personal file naming convention

If you haven’t read my other post on Programmers grammar I suggest you do so before reading this one for a bit of background.

After much research and consideration I settled on a general naming convention for my files on my filesystem. That convention is lowercase-hyphencase. So words are all lowercase and are separated by a hyphen. Example my-magic-text-file.txt. Notice how the only special character is a fullstop designating the beginning of the file type extension. I choose to always append a file extension where possible.

Numbers may also be present for date stamps or version numbers. Example 2019-05-25-gardening-notes.md. Notice how the date goes first, this is to aid with sorting/ordering in a directory listing. I use ISO 8601 date formats.

Many subfolders may also contain a README.md which hold metadata. This is normally a description of the folder structure if it’s unusual.

Folders also follow this naming convention. Example: pictures.

Any common words across several filenames should go before the differentiating words. For example: myfile-magic-cat.txt, myfile-magic-dog.txt

LF or CRLF? A tricky one, I should probably enforce one type on my NAS. My Git repos are always LF server side.

This is basically my general naming convention. Program source files have their own conventions: 2E0PGS/codingstyle

Reasons

• Easier on autocomplete in terminals. No need to hold shift.
• Is pretty much universally safe for programs to parse.
• It’s the web standard for URL format.
• Linux seems to have shifted to this standard from the old snake_case format for the core OS filesystem.

References

• Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
• RFC1738 - Uniform Resource Locators (URL)
• Jekyll structure
• Google JavaScript Style Guide
• Angular coding style guide