Should full paths ever be shown?

[inexorabletash]

One key innovation of the original Macintosh was that while file paths existed they were never exposed to users. Neither the Finder nor common dialogs (Open, Save, etc) ever showed paths. This simplifies the UI and the user's mental model. The user doesn't think of icons as representing files, or folders representing directories - icons are files. See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ for a deeper exploration of this.

DeskTop 1.3 eliminates file paths from the common file dialog, although this was initially done to simplify the UI. But should we take it further? Paths are shown for a handful of operations:

• During copy/move, as progress
• During "download" (copy to RAMCard, both in DeskTop and Selector), as progress
• During delete, as progress
• During lock/unlock, as progress
• On new folder creation, to show the parent path

These could all simply show the filename, which would simplify the UI.

On the other hand: DeskTop does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in an ecosystem of ProDOS applications, most of which do expose full file paths. So perhaps this is overly simplifying things, to the detriment of clarity.