macOS had always used your Account Name as your Username (Case-Preserving) but from around Catalina onwards it started downcasing usernames, so /Users/Yourname became /Users/yourname.
Is your username Capitalised or lowercased and which do you prefer?
My home directory is lowercase and I don’t mind/prefer it lowercase
My home directory is lowercase but I would prefer it Capitalised
My home directory is Capitalised and I don’t mind/prefer it Capitalised
My home directory is Capitalised and prefer it Capitalised, but am considering making it lowercase to be on the safe side/future compatibility
My home directory is Capitalised but I would prefer it lowercase
Other (please say in thread!)
0voters
If you’ve run into any issues because of it please share too
(If you’re wondering why they started lowercasing usernames they said it was to improve compatibility and reduce issues with command-line tools/scripts - though I never had any issues myself)
But wait, does it matter? The default filesystem for MacOS is case insensitive anyway, so you can do ls /uSERs/MyUsEr and it will still work. Or am I missing something wrt compatibility issues?
When Catalina changed it I changed it straight back - the inconsistency just didn’t sit right with me. We still have /Users/Shared and then all of our usual directories start with a capital letter resulting in a miss-mash, eg: /Users/aston/Documents/Projects. If you have your home folder in the Finder sidebar it would again be inconsistent and just look a bit wrong. I prefer this:
So for now I have changed my vote and I am sticking with it capitalised. Hopefully it won’t cause me any issues…
I believe they changed it to bring it in line with Unix conventions where user accounts are always lowercase, and from what I’ve read the main problems were because of Docker. However I don’t use Docker on my Mac and if I ever need it I’d just create a new account and use it via that.
The only issue I’ve had with this myself is when Apple made the change and thought it would be helpful to update everything else as well - it was a about 5 or 6 years ago now but IIRC they also changed the PG user for my account to lowercase, so when I changed my account back to Aston PG broke. If they had just left it it would have been fine.
Curious if anyone knows of any other potential issues tho..
Ah, unfortunately that always downcases the account name - the only way to Capitalise it now is by creating a second admin account, logging in with that, then Users & Groups > Advanced Options for the account you want to change. However I would not recommend doing this on an existing system with a dev environment already set up, best done on a fresh system.
