"For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I'm constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I'm convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I'm also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely."
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Member since:2009-01-06
How about the reverse - being able to organize the tags (or selected tags) in some form of hiearchy/structure?
For the operating system, a file is simply an unique identifier of an object and the location of this objecte on the storage medium. Other necessary stuff comes with it too like access rights, general attributes, and tags but these are add-ons to ease the management of these objects.
Isn't a directory/folder simply a list of files grouped together by some rules?
Member since:2005-11-02
The answer is drill-down tag clouds.
In a filter box type a simple string. Below you see all tags matching that substring with accompanying folder icons. Click on a folder icon to open a window showing all files tagged with that tag and a set of "folders" showing the union of all tags applied to all files tagged with the first tag. Clicking into one of these folders brings up a similar list showing all files tagged with the first tag and the second tag, plus folders representing the union of all other tags that those files have applied. Continue to drill down in this manner until the file set becomes small enough that you can search by file name or other meta data, or until there are no relevant tags to drill in to.
This gives you arbitrary "hierarchies" which are not rigid.
Member since:
2007-03-22
Instead of overhauling the whole experience, I would like some kind of intelligent filesystem that would interpret directory names as tags, and transparently make files available at different locations under the same unordered set of directory-tags, e.g.:
.../docs/articles/2010/...
would contain the same files as
.../docs/2010/articles/...
So there's no real change in GUIs, people can keep their working habits with directories, but the filesystem will help with organising files so that files are easier to access through different paths.
(Yes I know about hardlinks, but they're hard and need extra work! I want my tag-links to happen transparently)
Edited 2010-11-05 00:36 UTC