English UI Terminology: Directory, or Folder?

Question

When you are designing an application (assumed in English), and you ask the user to provide a path to a directory/folder, do you use the term Directory or Folder?

Is one more understood than the other? Is one more "correct" than the other?

Answer 1

In my experience, these tend to be the norm:

on Windows or any Mac OS: "Folder"
on *nix: "Directory"

The correctness of the term is wrapped up in how much your application behaves and talks like other applications on the platform so it is best to stick with convention as to not confuse your users.

Answer 2

Use whatever the target OS/DE uses. This definitely means "folder" on Win32, not sure about other platforms (though I think it is also definitely "folder" on OS X, and uncertain on Unix-likes). What you want is for your application to use the same terminology as all other apps, and system dialogs.

It also depends on the type of the application. For command-line applications, "directory" rather than "folder" seems to be the norm everywhere (including Win32).

Answer 3

The term Folder has been primary used by windows systems to make a better association to document-organization and is, as others said just another term. If you won't serve different terms for different systems, use the term Directory.

Answer 4

'Directory' is older and usually used on Unix-ish systems. 'Folder' is usually used on Windows. Personally, I use 'folder' even for GUI apps on both Linux and Windows, it just sounds more "user friendly". (And I doubt anyone will really care that I didn't use the "correct" term.)

If you think your users (e.g. technical users) will be happier with 'directory', use that, but otherwise, I would go with 'folder'.

Answer 5

Please note that they are not synonyms. Directories and Folders behave differently. For example, if you want to remove a File from a Folder, you need access to the Folder and the File, because the File is stored inside the Folder.

If, however, you want to remove a File from a Directory, you need access only to the Directory, because a Directory itself is just a regular File that lists the locations of (but does not contain) other Files. So, you just need to strike out that entry from the Directory, no access to the File is required.

This distinction is pretty important, because false and thus misleading metaphors can be at least confusing and in the worst case pretty dangerous when talking about filesystems. (Confusion about filesystem behaviour often translates into accidental information disclosure, data loss or security holes.)

A great percentage of questions on Unix mailinglists, but also here, on ServerFault and on SuperUser, about what to the asker seems to be confusing filesystem behaviour, can be traced directly back to thinking about Folders, when Unix does in fact have Directories.

So, in other words: use "Folder" when dealing with folders and "Directory" when dealing with directories.