After throwing away that thing you will never use to creating filenames far beyond 8.3 format, the problem always comes soon after the matter is fully resolved:
replyI'm not following?
replyI have a personal convention that all files I put into my synced folder must consist of lowercase alphanumeric characters, hyphens and periods (to be precise, match the regex /\.?([a-z0-9]([-.][a-z0-9])?)+/). It saves a lot of pain.
replyAnd you don’t see why Google would cater to Windows and a Mac users at the expense of Linux users?
replymacOS can also handle files with any of those characters in the filename, it's only Windows that's affected.
replyYou mean 90% of desktop users…
replyI am surprised that the # symbol isn’t on the list.
Not colon.
replyIt can handle files with colon in the name fine, Finder just won't let you name them like that. The files themselves work fine if you created them in the Terminal/through sync.
replyClassic MacOS used colon as a path separator, so to support creating files that could be opened on classic MacOS the Finder disallows it.
What types of files are you syncing that have those characters in their names?
replyPersonal notes, and tons of academic papers and ebooks, all of which might contain question marks and colons. Occasionally, I also use arrows -> in travel itineraries / ticket PDFs.
replyPutting a star into a filename is a pain in the ass, no matter the OS.
replyEscaping and quoting isn’t really that hard
replyYes and who needs Dropbox since for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
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