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Explore Teams Create a free Team 3. Teams 4. Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Explore Teams Teams Q&A for work Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Learn more about Teams Readme.txt vs. README.txt Ask Question Asked 8 years, 5 months ago Modified today Viewed 39k times 67 I have just forked a project in Github, made my changes etc. This got me wondering: I see mostly README.txt in opensource projects and the file I edited was Readme.txt. Is this some sort of standartisation or should I have left it as is? * naming-standards Share Improve this question Follow asked Nov 4, 2015 at 10:12 Tolga Ozses's user avatar Tolga OzsesTolga Ozses 79711 gold badge55 silver badges77 bronze badges 2 * 1 All-caps probably had its start in MS-DOS, all lower case probably from unix heritage. Not sure about the capitalised first letter - Mac roots, perhaps. In the end, it doesn't really matter except as a matter of tidiness or style. - Lawrence Nov 4, 2015 at 10:19 * 6 In this case @Lawrence, I don't think the casing of README files has anything to do with MS-DOS as there was not that sort of development going on. It was UNIX where all this sort of organisation originated and the README files were specifically upper case because it makes them stand out, partly because of all the lower case file names. Naming a file Readme seems lame to me. I'd say that's wrong casing. But it's a convention, so it can't really be "wrong". - NeilG Jul 25, 2023 at 23:46 Add a comment | 4 Answers 4 Sorted by: Reset to default [Highest score (default) ] 65 All-uppercase letters stand out and make the file easily visible which makes sense because it is probably the first thing a new user would want to look at. (Or, at least, should have looked at...) As others have already said, file names starting with a capital letter will be listed before lower-case names in ASCIIbetical sorting (LC_COLLATE=C) which helps make the file visible at a first glance. The README file is part of a bunch of files a user of a free software package would normally expect to find. Others are INSTALL (instructions for building and installing the software), AUTHORS (list of contributors), COPYING (license text), HACKING (how to get started for contributing, maybe including a TODO list of starting points), NEWS (recent changes) or ChangeLog (mostly redundant with version control systems). This is what the GNU Coding Standards have to say about the README file. The distribution should contain a file named README with a general overview of the package: + the name of the package; + the version number of the package, or refer to where in the package the version can be found; + a general description of what the package does; + a reference to the file INSTALL, which should in turn contain an explanation of the installation procedure; + a brief explanation of any unusual top-level directories or files, or other hints for readers to find their way around the source; + a reference to the file which contains the copying conditions. The GNU GPL, if used, should be in a file called COPYING. If the GNU LGPL is used, it should be in a file called COPYING.LESSER. Since it is always good to strive for the least surprise of your users, you should follow this convention unless there are compelling reasons for a deviation. In the UNIX world, file name extensions were traditionally used sparingly so the canonical name of the file is README without any suffix. But most users probably would have no troubles understanding that a file named README.txt has the same meaning. If the file is written in Markdown, a file name like README.md might also be reasonable. Avoid using more complicated markup languages like HTML in the README file, however, because it should be convenient to read on a text-only terminal. You can point users to the manual of the software or its on-line documentation, that might be written in a more sophisticated format, for details from the README file. Share Improve this answer Follow answered Nov 4, 2015 at 13:31 5gon12eder's user avatar 5gon12eder5gon12eder 7,18622 gold badges2424 silver badges2929 bronze badges Add a comment | 27 Traditionally the file was called README in uppercase because command-line environments that use alphabetical ordering would then put the file at the top. This makes them easily visible in big directories. It's most likely a holdover from the Unix/Linux world where you would download sources and then build your software. Having files like README and INSTALL at the top of your 'list directory contents' view makes it easier to see that they are there, instead of having to browse the entire contents from a command-line interface. The same basic principle works for github as well (and actually works in GUI interfaces too, come to think of it, so it might still hold merit) By no way a hard rule, but very likely something that everybody is doing as a habit because other projects are doing it. Unless there is some explicit reason NOT to, you should probably use all caps just because you'll see it being used that way in lots of other projects. It's also the default naming Github uses when you create a new repository. Share Improve this answer Follow edited Nov 4, 2015 at 11:02 answered Nov 4, 2015 at 10:54 JDT's user avatar JDTJDT 6,3801919 silver badges3232 bronze badges 2 * 1 I've always thought that all-uppercase was a form of emphasis, much like how you have the sections of uppercase in legalese. - Lars Viklund Nov 4, 2015 at 11:20 * 1 On a command line interface, the files that go to the top of the listing are actually the ones that scroll out of view first, so sometimes these are the least visible files. Unless you always do something like ls -l | less. - Marc van Leeuwen Nov 4, 2015 at 15:20 Add a comment | 11 README is usually written in upper case. In this way the ls Unix command placed the file near the beginning of the directory listing (upper-case letters comes before lower-case letters in ASCII ordering). Share Improve this answer Follow edited Nov 4, 2015 at 11:22 answered Nov 4, 2015 at 10:55 manlio's user avatar manliomanlio 4,22633 gold badges2525 silver badges3737 bronze badges 2 * 7 This was the historic reason, but ls doesn't typically sort that way on modern systems. - user82096 Nov 4, 2015 at 10:59 * 3 @dan1111 Right! Thank you (just to try... LC_COLLATE= "en_US.ascii" ; ls -l vs LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" ; ls -l) - manlio Nov 4, 2015 at 11:26 Add a comment | 1 README is usually contributed to the influence of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll. Alice encounters messages like EAT ME and DRINK ME. Share Improve this answer Follow answered 5 hours ago M Jansen's user avatar M JansenM Jansen 1111 bronze badge New contributor M Jansen is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. 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