You Windows guys are lucky. It's even a much bigger mess when it comes to AU plug-ins.
First of all, unlike VST plug-ins, they show the manufacturer name in front of the plug-in name, which is not useful at all.
Second, alphanumeric sorting does not work at all for AU(i) plug-ins (the order seems to be related to the chronological order of installing / validation or something like that), so the list becomes a complete mess.
Third, newly installed AU plug-ins never show up in the "New" category - which is thus broken for its purported usage.
And to stay with the theme of this thread, some pictures:
This is what I used in a Pure data patch for use with REAPER's OSC Control Surface feature, which supports sending plug-in names. Of course, when displaying things like effect names on a remote controller, there are often limits on how much characters one can put on a physical display, so every character counts.