What if cating a directory rendered its contents as a structured file?

First reaction: get rid of directories altogether. But it seems useful to firewall off different kinds of content from each other.

Still, the file system could support treating files as dirs.

It seems useful to have consistent lexical conventions spanning paths and code: '#' for comments; '.' for lookup; '/' for metadata. E.g. to look up gitconfig:

cat ~.conf.git.core.pager

Metadata is a new idea here; I use it extensively in my Mu project. In this context, one possible use for it is extensions. Rewriting the above example:

cat ~.conf.git/yaml.core.pager

Swapping the usual meanings of '/' and '.' in Unix seems maximally confusing. I'm choosing here to preserve the meaning of '.' in source code. But that may be the wrong choice.

Anyways, back to metadata. It permits multiple extensions. Say for a MS Word doc:

thesis/doc/docx/doc-v2007

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