Older versions of mac did enforce NFD for file names, but more recent names don't, at least at the OS level. But many apple programs, such as finder _will_ use NFD. Except that it isn't even Unicode standardized NFD, it is Apple's own modified version of it. And this can cause issues when for example you create a file in finder, then search for it using `find`, and type the name of the file the exact same way, but it can't find the file because find got an NFC form, but the actual file is in NFD.
OTOH, in many applications, you don't really care about the normalization form used. For example, if you are parsing a CSV, you probably don't need to worry about if one of the cells using using a single code point or two code points to represent that accented e.
Thanks, yet another quantum of knowledge that makes one's life irreversibly ever so slightly worse. But not as bad as encryption (and learning all the terrible ways most applications have broken implementations in)
It's actually worse than that.
Older versions of mac did enforce NFD for file names, but more recent names don't, at least at the OS level. But many apple programs, such as finder _will_ use NFD. Except that it isn't even Unicode standardized NFD, it is Apple's own modified version of it. And this can cause issues when for example you create a file in finder, then search for it using `find`, and type the name of the file the exact same way, but it can't find the file because find got an NFC form, but the actual file is in NFD.
OTOH, in many applications, you don't really care about the normalization form used. For example, if you are parsing a CSV, you probably don't need to worry about if one of the cells using using a single code point or two code points to represent that accented e.