The File Filesystem (2021)

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho.

Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality.

Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Really what you'd like to see is a way to write the mount command for each file type (do one thing well) and another command to detect the file type and dispatch accordingly (probably similar to the `file` command), all in user space.

The only thing standing in the way of this today is that MacOS doesn't expose a user space file system API. You can do this on Linux, Windows, and BSDs today.

(No, file provider extensions don't cut it, Apple devs who read this, please give us a FUSE equivalent, we know it exists).