Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

macOS has case sensitivity. It's just off by default and is a major pain to turn on. You have to either reinstall from scratch onto a case-sensitive partition, or change the "com.apple.backupd.VolumeIsCaseSensitive" xattr from 0 to 1 in a Time Machine backup of your whole system and then restore everything from it.


You shouldn't do this if you value things working, though-- this is a pretty rare configuration (you have to go way out of your way to get it), so many developers won't test with it and it's not unheard of for applications to break on case-sensitive filesystems.

If you absolutely need case-sensitivity for a specific application or a specific project, it's worth seeing if you can do what you need to do within a case-sensitive disk image. It may not work for every use-case where you might need a case-sensitive FS, but if it does work for you, it avoids the need to reinstall to make the switch to a case-sensitive FS, and should keep most applications from misbehaving because the root FS is case-sensitive.


Most things work fine, but it will break (or at least did break at one point) Steam, Unreal Engine, Microsoft OneDrive, and Adobe Creative Cloud. I'm rather surprised about the first two, since they both support Linux with case-sensitive filesystems. I took the opposite approach as you, though: making my root filesystem case-sensitive and creating a case-insensitive disk image if I ever needed those broken programs.


I keep a case sensitive volume around to checkout code repositories into. For everything else I prefer it insensitive, but my code is being deployed to a case sensitive fs.


I just mount a case sensitive Apple File System disk image at ~/code, works well




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: