Stuff like this is why I love Mac OS X and wouldn’t dream of using anything else:

This shows the “Recent” menu present in most Mac OS X applications. It offers quick access to documents the user has previously worked on.

In this particular case, the menu shows that in the past I worked on two documents with identical filenames but stored in different locations. The “Recent” menu entries would normally be of no use in figuring out which one is the one I want. But Mac OS X notices the duplicates and provides a helpful hint by appending a folder name to the document name.

Until now I thought that it simply appends the document’s parent folder name, but I just realized that it is smarter than that, it ascends the hierarchy until it finds the first non-matching folder. The two documents you see in the screenshot are stored in these locations:

/Users/liyanage/svn/entropy/xmlviewplugin/XMLWebKitPlugin.xcodeproj
/Users/liyanage/git/entropy/xmlviewplugin/XMLWebKitPlugin.xcodeproj

The git or svn folders are three levels up from the document name and they are the first ones to differ on the path of the documents.

If I change one of the xmlviewplugin or entropy folder names, then those show up. It’s brilliant!

It’s a small, simple detail but immensely useful for everyday work. Whoever thought of this implementation is a genius :-). Stuff like this, and there’s a lot of it, is what’s so great about Mac OS X.