I’m sure this will get some eye-rolls, but as someone who is tedious about semantic naming, I had to share.
I got Arch installed on my desktop PC today (to replace Windows 11), and spent a lot of time brainstorming a name for my large/slow SSD’s mount point (games, backups, etc.). I wanted something that felt linguistically consistent with the Linux ‘tree’ metaphor but functionally descriptive of a heavy storage container.
I landed on: /trunk
Why it works:
The Tree Logic: We already have / (root). It feels biologically sound that extending from the root should be the trunk. From there, subdirectories like movies or games become the branches. It feels much more organic than /mnt or /media.
The “Heft” Factor: ‘Trunk’ sounds sturdy. It’s a short, satisfying word to type, and cd /trunk feels much more ‘at home’ than cd /mnt/storage_hdd_2tb.
It’s a small detail, but it makes the terminal experience feel just a little more cohesive.
Does anyone else use non-standard naming conventions for their mount points that just ‘click’ for them? Or am I the only one who spends way too much time thinking about filesystem logic?
That’s interesting, but /trunk is simply the main extension from /root, surely if you add another path it should be /branch, /bough, and then subfolders might be /twig, /stem and /shoot or even /sprout , /offshoot and for lateral spread we have /rhizome.
So you can keep your pictures in /trunk/branch/twig/leaf.
Absolutely brilliant idea. But no, I ‘mount’ on /mnt because that’s perfectly descriptive. Interestingly, I store Audio in /Audio too, and not /tendril
Haha, I love the energy! You’re absolutely right though—you’d definitely run into some roadblocks if you tried to map out the entire filesystem that way. My /trunk idea was really just meant to work as a conceptual link between the root (/) and a primary storage mount. The trunk is not only essentially the main and largest “branch” of a tree (which starts at the roots), but a trunk is also a type of storage container. Pushing the metaphor much beyond that starts to break down quickly, but it’s a fun thought experiment!
Then if you want to organize your images into different sub folders you can name those after the different bugs that live on the leaves, or what ever. This is neat.
Network drives could be mapped as different kinds of birds, perhaps, removable storage could be named after squirrels and other creatures that come and go.
I guess you need to name them after the molecules, then the atoms that make up those molecules, and then after the electrons, protons, neutrons, that compose the atoms, then after the sub components that comprise those… eventually you’ll hit the bleeding edge of our understanding of physics and the building blocks of life, and will have to shift into your own science fiction version of the universe.
Yes, and the file manager could be something like this from those old SGI workstations, but like instead of a city, it would be a tree model that is generated based on the layout and contents of your file system.
