Hide file extensions by default
Currently, all extensions are visible in Files (/the file picker portal) with no option to disable them. This has been the standard way to present files for decades but in recent years this has changed.
Issues
There has been an "industry"-wide trend to hide file extensions from non-technical users. If someone was trying out GNOME for the first time coming from a desktop where they were hidden by default, it could lead to confusion.
Of course, reasons they started to be hidden are themselves important to consider.
They are an archaic concept with no real place in graphical user interfaces. Knowing whether an image is JPEG or WebP is largely irrelevant or confusing to most people. Having it persistently visible introduces a lot of visual noise. In contrast to this, thumbnails are a great way to communicate a file's type.
Being at the end of file names, if one is long enough, the file extension will be cut off and invisible regardless.
Proposal
That being said, it is unrealistic to assume we can eliminate file extensions altogether. There are still places where they are needed to differentiate different specific file types, the most important of these are:
- Plaintext files (source code, JSON, etc.)
- Project files (eg. Inkscape SVG)
Adding an option to toggle back to the status quo is basically required. However, we can reduce the cases where this is needed and find a middle ground:
Selectively hiding file extensions based on the file type. As I've said earlier, for some files, file extensions are basically necessary to identify file types. But for some, the opposite is true.
For images, videos, audio files and office documents, we could very well hide file extensions by default without disrupting too many people's workflow. Even then, for those and those times that require it, we should introduce something like a 'Show All File Extensions' menu item next to 'Show Hidden Files'.
For file types which are in the middle or undetermined in terms of importance of extensions, eg. archives or TXT files, I believe it would be best to default to showing file extensions to be cautious.
This does also tie into app-mockups#54