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Whenever I move or rename files with my desktop file browser, it causes havoc with other desktop applications. The apps can no longer find the files.

What can I do to make my desktop apps stop being so obtuse, and just see that my files have been moved or renamed, and to update their own references accordingly?

You can see it in apps like the Kate text editor, whose quite useful 'sessions' feature is rendered almost entirely useless by the mere act of files being used or renamed. Other apps are the same. Firefox loses track of downloads, for example. Rsync goes through the rigmarole when updating a mirror copy of a file tree that has been renamed, of deleting the original, because it thinks it no longer exists, and copying the renamed files all over again, wearing one's media out in the process. One's own scripts are in a constant state of fragility, because of this inconvenience that has been overlooked by the underlying filesystem, which is that users use computers, and that moving and renaming files is the most fundamental thing their operating system interfaces encourage them to do, and the one basic thing all filesystem browsers do for them.

Bearing in mind that this is 2020, nearly 30 years after Linus Torvalds implemented the extended linux file system, and 50 years since the first implementation of Unix (oh and 40 years since the first MS-DOS); surely there is some filesystem tweak that will stop all my apps breaking any time I move or rename a bunch of files?

markling
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  • Related. – Kamil Maciorowski Jun 08 '20 at 11:43
  • Do you find that the issue is solved on other operating systems? – Kusalananda Jun 08 '20 at 12:48
  • perhaps you need to develop a file system that reads your mind – jsotola Jun 08 '20 at 14:45
  • perhaps I need a filesystem that was conceived for the sort of user who existed in 1969 (i.e. an operating system programmer or admin working on some egg-head, bleeding edge mainframe), copied for son-of-the-same-sort-of-user in 1981 and 1992, and inherited by the sort of users we have today: 'knowledge workers' and 'power users', mostly, whose main job function is not unix administration and o/s programming, but, you would think, pulling their hair out and gnashing their teeth in frustration. – markling Jun 09 '20 at 21:31

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