Annoying new naming rules in the newest version!

Hi I just upgraded the ARduino IDE, but now it wont accept all my sketch filenames which were working fine before!
E.g. now it only accepts 63 chars! And not space and not "&" sign!
Its rediculous! We live in 2023, and there should be no strictions like coding DOS in the 80ies!

WHY u made your IDE worse?
And will u fix it in an update? PLS!

When we work with prototyping and test programs like Arduino, its important, at least for me, to be able to have long telling file names with telling content, version numbers etc.

I now really regret I upgraded the IDE! But felt forced bcs that annoying popup asking to update every time I opened the IDE.

Please, no. It isn't just DOS that demands no spaces in file names, it's practically the entire world. Only Microsoft allowed that to happen, but it's a dumbing down in my opinion. Why? Because it screws any syntax that parses file names individually. Also, 63 characters? Really? Start organizing your sketches in nested folders, you will never need to resort to that again.

... and the '&' sign? Don't get me started...

Hi @ardunew

There is nothing to fix. This was always the intended behavior. The bug was that previously Arduino IDE 2.x allowed the creation of sketches with invalid names that violate the Arduino Sketch Specification:

https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/sketch-specification/#sketch-folders-and-files

The new behavior aligns Arduino IDE 2.x with Arduino IDE 1.x and Arduino Cloud so that a sketch created in one Arduino development tool can be used in others; a very important thing in this community of sharing open source software.

I think that you will find the restrictions are not so onerous once you give the new version some time.

THE ONLY IDE version that has supported spaces in filenames was a 2.0.3. And that was a mistake that has now been fixed.
IDE 1.x versions never supported spaces.

You can disable that behaviour.

  1. Press <ctrl><shift>P inn the IDE
  2. A textbox will show; type update
  3. Click the first entry (from below screenshot

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.