[HN Gopher] Yet another hot take on "folders versus tags"
___________________________________________________________________
Yet another hot take on "folders versus tags"
Author : not-now
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-01-24 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eleanorkonik.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eleanorkonik.com)
| endisneigh wrote:
| What can you do with folders that you cannot with tags?
| sseagull wrote:
| It's not about ability, but mindset.
|
| Folders are tree structures where each file lives in only one
| place (in practice, hard links are uncommon, and symlinks are
| more common but obvious).
|
| That abstraction is useful when navigating, looking for related
| files, etc.
|
| Tags are more general. Yes, they could implement the features
| of folders, but the connotation of tags is that they are flat
| and unstructured.
| mro_name wrote:
| exclusivity.
| endisneigh wrote:
| you can do that with tags tho.
| brazzy wrote:
| > Sometimes people will ask me what I do when I have something
| that could go into multiple places and the answer has always been
| pretty simple: if something could conceivably fit in two
| different folders I need to consolidate my folders.
|
| How does that not lead to an end result where you have _one_
| folder "everything", and thus no organization at all? There's
| always edge cases.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| I've got over 2k files in my Obsidian vault and haven't had a
| problem really.
|
| I think it depends on how you categorize things? I'm never
| going to confuse my tax documents with my short fiction, or my
| character profiles for a fantasy character for my daily notes
| page.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| >Error establishing a database connection
|
| Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.
| riffic wrote:
| running a wordpress is a noble endeavor but it isn't ideal for
| unexpected traffic hugs from a site like this.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| I am _literally_ mid-migration to Ghost because of how slow
| Wordpress is :( :( :(
| riffic wrote:
| The Ghost team has been talking about moving more towards
| the JAMstack model (static sites, basically). I don't run
| it myself but it's something worth looking into depending
| on your traffic expectations in the future:
|
| https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/01/11/ghost-on-the-
| jamstac...
| bacro wrote:
| I guess it was so hot, that the database melted.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| I'm hosted on Digital Ocean, and the irony is, I'm literally
| mid-migration to Ghost from Wordpress -- if this had happened
| a week later this wouldn't have happened.
|
| I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being
| honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me, so
| it's going to take me a minute to figure out how to add more
| bandwidth or whatever.
| riffic wrote:
| if you're expecting more bursty traffic coming your way
| from reddit or HN, it might be best to deploy a static site
| out to something like Vercel, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare
| Pages, Netlify, et cetera. it's not really as easy as
| running from a WordPress instance but it'll better handle
| these sort of events.
|
| DigitalOcean's App Platform supports static sites too.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I 'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but
| being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for
| me_
|
| Yeah, HN can be all "why didn't you just...?" when a site
| gets hit with traffic, but you know what? I've been in this
| industry for over 30 years, had a decent stint at Microsoft
| and other companies you've heard of, working on stuff
| you've probably used. And if my stupid blog somehow ended
| up on the front page of $POPULAR_SITE I wouldn't have the
| first clue how to increase bandwidth. Oh, 30 years of this
| shite means I know where to immediately start looking, but
| off the top of my head? _phhhhht_ And it sure as hell would
| take me more than "a minute to figure out how to add more
| bandwidth or whatever". :-)
|
| Point is, your page hit the HN lottery, no need for
| apology. I can bookmark it for later.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| If I can figure out how to GET to my wordpress page for
| long enough, I'll set up a redirect and mirror it as an
| article on https://obsidianroundup.org/ -- which is
| literally what I was working on this week, haha, the nice
| folks at Ghost's concierge already helped me do it for my
| history nerd stuff newsletter.
|
| Someone reached out and said I can use Cloudflare to fix
| this, so I'm gonna go try that, doot doot.
| mattnewton wrote:
| This - I've worked fullstack on apps that do unfathomable
| numbers of connections per second. But for a personal
| blog the best thing I could muster is probably go to the
| cloudflare site with my wallet in hand and click around
| nervously until I figure out how to buy caching from them
| before it falls off the top page of hacker news.
| weaksauce wrote:
| It's the database that is being hit(multiple times
| probably) every page request. typically you would add a
| caching layer to wordpress so that each url would get
| cached for N minutes so you don't need to do the expensive
| rendering each time.
| Jarwain wrote:
| If you want something quick and easy, just sign up for a
| free account at Cloudflare and hook up their CDN. It's a
| useful thing to have even when you've switched to
| WordPress, too.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Ah, bless, this is exactly what I am doing right now and
| it is much less terrifying than I thought it would be.
|
| Ironically, this has been on my todo list to learn -- I
| want to mirror my Obsidian notes and that requires
| Cloudflare and before today I've been too nervous to muck
| around with it.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Or, uh, switched to ghost. Although ghost could likely
| handle it on its own
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's an old problem. You just need WP-Cache or WP-
| SuperCache or successor plugins. i.e. not your fault, this
| happens to everyone who runs WP.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Oh god I'm sorry I wasn't expecting this level of traffic, let
| me see if I can fix it.
| jetrink wrote:
| Here's an archive link for now:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220124201438/https://eleanorko.
| ..
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Don't worry about it, it's the HN effect. I really recommend
| using a PaaS like Netlify (I'm not sponsored or affiliated).
| It will take a weight off your shoulders the next time you
| get a surge.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| I think I managed to get Cloudflare set up, let's hope that
| works
| [deleted]
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I just accept that modern computing is complex, and requires a
| multitude of methods to organise and navigate.
|
| For example, I use Digikam from KDE to manage my photos. It has a
| LOT of ways to file and retrieve photos. First are collections,
| and they contain folders that are a window to the filesystem. (I
| like that, because it means only maintaining one filing system.)
| Inside a folder view, you can also group photos by dragNdrop. You
| also have star ratings, tags, flags, locations and faces. You can
| search by dates, locations on a map, or show images that are
| similar. The list goes on. It is very flexible, so you can choose
| your workflow.
| hyferg wrote:
| Check out Bonsai Browser [0] if you want to see what a web
| browser built on tagging rather than folders looks like
| (disclaimer: co-founder).
|
| I think the main virtue of tagging systems is in the low friction
| to add info and multiple inclusion.
|
| Tagging also has its downsides and I think we'll probably end up
| on some hybrid system in the long run.
|
| [0] https://bonsaibrowser.com/
| wsinks wrote:
| Seemed interesting, but why do you have to have an account to
| log in?
|
| I was going to try it out, but.. I just hate not being able to
| try something before giving away my email.
| hyferg wrote:
| Maybe we can add anon accounts at some point. The main reason
| right now is to make the feedback process easier since it
| starts an email chain that we can follow up on. All of the
| best improvements recently have started with these email
| chains and follow on conversations.
| hooande wrote:
| You'll get more and higher quality feedback from a larger
| volume of users. And right now you're self selecting for
| people who are willing to use their email to create an
| account.
|
| The best way to improve a product is to have a lot of
| people use it
| dariusj18 wrote:
| I miss the promise of WinFS
| ryanjkirk wrote:
| Folders work perfectly in a pure hierarchical taxonomy. Many
| classifications defy this rigid of a structure, however. For
| example:
|
| Widget 1: it is A and B but not C, so tag it with A and B.
|
| Widget 2: it is A and B and C, so tag it A, B, and C.
|
| Widget 3: it is B only, so tag it B.
|
| That is pretty simple, but you couldn't represent that in a
| folder system without permutation folders, meaning you now have
| folder sprawl, making things harder to find.
|
| This is how servers and ec2s are for almost everyone. Billing
| codes, environments, teams, business units, etc. A folder
| taxonomy to replace ec2 tags would be a nightmare.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| After the past 5 years or so of experiencing the supposed best
| "folderless" computing has to offer on iOS and ideologically
| similar platforms.
|
| I've gained huge respect for how beautiful the concept of the
| folder is.
| [deleted]
| daenz wrote:
| I wrote Supertag[0] specifically to get the same kind of
| ergonomics with tags as you get with folders. Basically you can
| dynamically render sub-folders based on the tags that apply to
| your current selection.
|
| Example: /A/B contains the intersection of tags A and B. If
| sub-folder C exists underneath /A/B, it's because one of the
| files in the intersection also has tag C.
|
| 0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they can't
| replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items that
| naturally fall into several categories, like music or books,
| but not for general file systems.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they
| can't replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items
| that naturally fall into several categories, like music or
| books, but not for general file systems.
|
| This. They're different tools for different jobs. Being a
| dogmatist and trying to win an us vs them competition on
| which is the ONE TRUE SOLUTION is stupid. That's like trying
| to argue which is a better tool, a screwdriver or a pair of
| pliers, and saying it's stupid to keep a screwdriver in a
| toolbox. Honestly, in a lot of cases both should be
| implemented and available.
|
| Stupid reasons pliers are better than screwdrivers:
|
| * There are so many different kinds of screwdrivers; it's too
| confusing to users.
|
| * Pliers can be used to drive screws, so there's no need for
| a dedicated screw-driving tool. We've had a lot of success
| gripping the screw head with pliers and turning.
|
| * Pliers are beautiful and modern, and lots of popular
| influencers are using pliers now. Screwdrivers are old tech
| and ugly.
| jdechko wrote:
| Your toolbox analogy is great for another reason. I can
| "tag" my screwdrivers with multiple items: Philips, flat,
| Torx, Square, short, long, ratcheting... Each screwdriver
| can have multiple tags. But I store them all in the same
| drawer in my toolbox.
| munificent wrote:
| _> if tags can imitate them, they can 't replace their
| structure._
|
| Technically, they can. A "folder" is just a tag whose name is
| the entire directory path up to root. All files with that
| same tag are in the same folder.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Assuming the tags cannot be linked in hierarchies/graphs.
| politician wrote:
| And yet, folders are tags.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| In the sense that a staircase can be used to seat guests.
| Folders are not like tags, tags are like flat folders.
| Folders are better at separating, tags are better at
| mixing.
| mro_name wrote:
| just veeery shy ones.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Agree. They both have a place. I use Zotero to keep track of
| my references and also just interesting things I find. It
| uses folders and tags. Fantastic!
| throwoutway wrote:
| Could you describe your Zotero folder & tag strategy? I
| don't know where to start with this and it's a hot mess
| 24thofjan wrote:
| Here you can see uses of folders and tags. It's from an
| academic context but you'll get the idea.
| https://youtu.be/efLOqgS4jzA
| joe8756438 wrote:
| I think a casual relationship to tags and folders together is the
| way. I built a system that allows both [0]. And using them
| together has some advantages. It's important that nothing of type
| A could ever be of type B. This is useful managing client work,
| and other things like transactional data. Folders handle this
| scenario. OTOH, a lot of research material for one bucket might
| be related to another, for me that's usually programming related
| articles etc. I want to review all that stuff together -- a tag
| handles that.
|
| In other words, folders create boundaries between information,
| and tags connect across those boundaries.
|
| [0]. https://www.tatatap.com
| dejj wrote:
| Shameless plug:
|
| I wrote a Nemo extension [1] that lets you add columns for #tags
| @persons or $whatever you put in a filename. You can sort by
| these columns. For complex things, there's always `find`.
|
| [1] https://github.com/dejj/nemo-addons/blob/main/nemo-
| python/ex...
| asciimov wrote:
| I still want a filesystem that can do both.
|
| I want to have regular folders, and then folders that I can issue
| a SQL style query to generate their contents.
|
| Take multimedia. With a traditional file system you can only have
| one type of sort. Typically by type (audio, video, image) and
| then alphabetically. It would often be nice to have a folder that
| is formed by querying the metadata, say all the items released in
| the 1950's, or all the items that are a low quality copy.
| fishtacos wrote:
| MS tried it [0] and failed. It was not easy. This was in the
| days of Whistler, Blackcomb and Longhorn and always an
| interesting read if you've the time. [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS [1]
| https://hal2020.com/2013/03/10/winfs-integratedunified-stora...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Apple did it and succeeded? In MacOS you can use tags and/or
| folders to organize files, and there is an OS-wide search
| index (Spotlight).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| With symlinks (or hard links for that matter) you can have
| folders work like tags in a real filesystem.
|
| That said, binary classification (object A is a member of class
| B, a function with a boolean truth value) is the basic concept in
| classification. That is, any classification can be represented
| correctly with binary classification.
|
| There really are a few things where you assign something a
| category from a finite set (like a chess game was won by "White",
| "Black" or was a draw) but frequently when people build
| ontologies based the idea that "A is a member of one of this set
| of categories" they are going to screw it up.
| jancsika wrote:
| > With symlinks (or hard links for that matter) you can have
| folders work like tags in a real filesystem.
|
| The word _can_ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
|
| Tagging system (at least the ones I've seen): enter the tags as
| autocompleted tokens in a single text entry. Possibly the
| system can autosuggest a number of tokens, possibly not,
| depending on your use case.
|
| Symlinks-as-Tagging-System: I want to save a file called
| "foo.txt" and start editing it immediately. How do I enter the
| tags?
| hotdag wrote:
| Presumably the same way you would enter tags in a regular
| program that has tags, except the datastructure would be
| stored as a disk file system. you dont necessarily have to
| manually run ln -s every time, the same way you dont have to
| run a sql insert to update a tumblr posts tags.
| vannevar wrote:
| Is there some reason that a filesystem couldn't be written to
| permit multiple paths to the same file without the clunkiness
| of sym links?
| throwaway_Aef8 wrote:
| I have the answer it's a graph based filesystem! Just kidding
| I don't really have an "answer" just your question inspired
| me to Google for a graph based file system.
|
| https://fsgeek.ca/2019/05/09/graph-file-systems/
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's a hard link. They have problems too.
| bityard wrote:
| Unix has supported multiple paths pointing to the same inode
| for a very long time. `man ln`.
| zinekeller wrote:
| (Windows) NTFS has hard links which are multiple pointers to
| the same file, but I imagine that the strict separation
| between FSes that made it possible in NT is also the reason
| why Unix, which has a single arbitrary hierarchy, doesn't
| have hard links.*
|
| * Yes there _are_ hard links, but the single hierarchy means
| that unless you memorised the specific FS of each folder, it
| 's gonna be hard.
| ryanjkirk wrote:
| That would be a hard link, though they can't cross filesystem
| boundaries.
| jerf wrote:
| The problem with multiple paths leading to the same file
| isn't with the file system, but with the file system users.
| When you're writing scripts or programs against file systems
| it is really convenient to assume that each filename is one
| and only one file, that the file has a unique name, and that
| the file system is strictly a tree.
|
| File systems can technically break all of these; files can
| contain multiple files within themselves with many file
| systems, the ability to have multiple paths leading to the
| same file means that if you just have the file in hand you
| don't have a unique path, which also means that if you remove
| that name it doesn't mean you've removed the file. But most
| of the time, you can kinda get away with writing normal code
| and it'll do the right thing. But that last one really burns.
| It is really easy to write code assuming file systems are
| just trees, and in particular can't have infinite loops, and
| be wrong about that.
| em-bee wrote:
| i make extensive use of hardlinks in my files (especially
| with photos), and i don't see the problem. if i remove a
| file, i don't usually want it gone completely, but i want
| removed from this particular location, if it is hardlinked
| elsewhere, i usually still want to keep it there.
|
| if i want to really remove it, i can scrub the contents
| without removing the hardlink, and if i want to delete
| after scrubbing i check the hardlink count and search for
| the remaining entries.
| malkia wrote:
| If only symlinks worked for every software / OS. On Windows at
| least, there are so many different way to link things
| (including "subst") that it's hard to get idea which one to
| use. (I do love symlinks, but having spent most of my time on
| Windows, there are some edge cases I've hit, for example some
| third_party software not following the symlink and simply
| failing to open the file..., and no that was not the old .lnk
| style link)
| sumtechguy wrote:
| mklink if anyone is curious. It can act oddly in a few cases.
| Especially if you cross volume/network boundries.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Spatial metaphors is arguably the easiest shortcut to a design
| that makes sense to humans. Spatial reasoning is something even
| animals are capable of.
|
| Categories are much more abstract, and while useful, less
| intuitive.
|
| Which is why folders should remain, complement them with other
| means of navigation for sure, but hiding them away will only make
| things less intuitive.
|
| In the end, whatever capabilities your design has are only as
| useful as their ability to be understood and used.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Indeed, consider how one navigates a "memory palace" going into
| a specific room (=folder) !
| stickfigure wrote:
| I've always wanted to see a "folder view" of a purely tags-based
| system. At the root level, `ls` shows you a list of tags (and
| possibly "all files"). cd into a tag, and `ls` shows you a list
| of the remaining tags (and relevant files). Repeat as many times
| as you like.
|
| Example session might look something like this:
| / $ ls -d foo bar baz / $ cd foo /foo $
| ls -d bar baz /foo $ cd baz /foo/baz $ ls
| -d bar
|
| Obviously, at the root level you're also including all files so a
| naked `ls` would return a lot of output. But this seems like a
| good way to bridge to the POSIX world; you could probably
| implement it on any modern OS with a FUSE filesystem.
| daenz wrote:
| I'm really trying not to overly promote Supertag[0] in this
| thread (disclaimer: I am the author) , but it does exactly what
| you describe.
|
| 0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Does this also allow looking for e.g. files that are either
| in tag A or B or both? Intuitively I'd guess this is a
| limitation when you use a path to filter files, though I
| might be wrong.
| xtracto wrote:
| In my opinion, any OpenSource application should not be
| bashed for promoting in threads like these. What will you
| win? probably more work as more people try your software and
| raise issues (feature requests or bugs). The fact that it is
| Libre means that any "self promotion" will not have any
| monetary gain, so it is fine with me.
|
| Aaaaanyways... SuperTag looks AMAZING. I will give it a try
| right now and see how it works for me. Thanks a lot for
| implementing it :)
|
| EDIT: It doesn't want to install for me on OSX :( Oh well, it
| sounded too good to be true haha. ~ brew
| install amoffat/rnd/supertag Running `brew
| update --preinstall`... ==> Tapping amoffat/rnd
| Cloning into
| '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/amoffat/homebrew-rnd'...
| remote: Enumerating objects: 24, done. remote:
| Counting objects: 100% (24/24), done. remote:
| Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done. remote:
| Total 24 (delta 4), reused 24 (delta 4), pack-reused 0
| Receiving objects: 100% (24/24), done. Resolving
| deltas: 100% (4/4), done. Error: Invalid formula:
| /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/amoffat/homebrew-
| rnd/supertag.rb supertag: Unsupported special
| dependency :osxfuse Error: Cannot tap amoffat/rnd:
| invalid syntax in tap!
| Melatonic wrote:
| Very interesting
| gorjusborg wrote:
| why choose?
|
| Current desktop operating systems have hierarchical filesystems
| _and_ support flat lookup via indexing (e.g. MacOS 's spotlight).
| ggm wrote:
| 2021
| gorjusborg wrote:
| https://archive.is/M9r4Q
| pphysch wrote:
| Trees/hierarchies ("folders") are for organization, unconstrained
| graphs/networks ("tags") are for ontologies. Crossing these
| streams leads to a lot of trouble.
|
| When flexible graphs/networks are abused for organizational
| purposes, you get circular dependencies, spaghetti code, and
| general dysfunction. Organizations (code or people) _need_ to be
| easy to navigate.
|
| When rigid hierarchies are abused for classification purposes,
| you run into "class House, class Boat, class HouseBoat extends
| ???" knots. Ontologies _need_ to be flexible.
|
| Modern filesystems necessarily use both: we have folders, and we
| have file types/tags.
| culi wrote:
| You could hypothetically collapse the two though. You can have
| tags and could use those to automatically generate efficient
| organization structures.
|
| For example, say you have the following datums with the
| following tags apple: plant, Rosaceae,
| tree, fruit peach: plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit
| rose: plant, Rosaceae, shrub, flower dandelion:
| plant, Asteraceae, herb, flower carrot: plant,
| Apiaceae, herb, root pig: animal, Suidae
|
| You can then try to generate a folder structures that optimizes
| certain parameters like keeping the average number of children
| to not too far away from ~6 and/or minimizing the depth of the
| repo structure or whatever. Depending on how you wanna optimize
| it, you could end up with a number of structures such as:
| root - plant - tree - apple -
| peach - herb - dandelion - carrot
| - rose - animals - pig
|
| or root - Rosaceae - apple
| - peach - rose - animal - pig -
| other - dandelion - carrot
|
| You can use your imagination to think of better structures or
| optimization problems, but you get the basic point. We can have
| tags be our primary classification method and have the
| organizational structure be an outcome of that.
| pphysch wrote:
| I like this approach: building a simple folder interface on
| top of a more flexible tag system, which can always be
| accessed when necessary. I think many systems would benefit
| from it.
|
| There are tradeoffs, though: a fair bit of overhead for each
| heavily nested item. And you would want some support for
| ensuring the integrity of the hierarchies (i.e. someone
| accidentally removes "tree" from the tag set of "apple").
| throwaway_Aef8 wrote:
| maybe on top of your idea ensure there's a graph feature
| like at the top right of
| https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index
| githubalphapapa wrote:
| Here's a library for writing such classification systems in
| Emacs Lisp: https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el
|
| Especially, see this example:
| https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el#sporty-understanding-
| co...
| willbudd wrote:
| An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the
| past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are
| purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)
| [deleted]
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Maybe something like "hierarchical taxonomy", or just simply
| class hierarchy? Though I'm not aware of such a term that's
| explicitly for tags if that's the point.
| jeddy3 wrote:
| I'm having troubles visualising what you mean, without it
| becoming "just folders".
|
| Can you elaborate?
| willbudd wrote:
| As a node in a tree hierarchy any folder can only have one
| parent folder. Tags of course allow nodes to have any
| number of parents (aka "associations").
|
| The relationship between arbitrary nodes in a tree can be
| determined by tracing their common ancestry, but tags don't
| provide equivalent functionality, unless you strictly
| define how tags themselves relate to other tags. An obvious
| way to do so is to prescribe that every tag shall have
| exactly one parent (except for the root abstract "thing"
| tag).
|
| In other words tags become folders, but any non-folder
| content of those folders can simultaneously live inside any
| number of folders. Similar to symlinks, but arguably less
| hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual"
| location and "linked" location.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I'm not sure of a name, but Tiddlywiki does this. You create
| hierarchies by having tags by creating an item with the tag
| as its name which causes all items with said tag to be a
| child of that item. This has a nice side effect of allowing
| items to exist in multiple locations (so no unique parent is
| enforced) while still requiring the graph to be acyclic.
|
| It ends up working kind of like hard links for folders/files,
| but it is a lot easier to setup since child items are the
| ones which declare where they are located, not the
| parents/directories. I think another reason why hard links
| are more difficult to use than this particular system is that
| with Tiddlywiki, it is easy to see all the locations an item
| falls under at once as well as seeing all the items at a
| particular location. I feel like adding this reverse location
| information would be quite helpful and would be less of a
| change than implementing tags for existing filesystems.
| irrational wrote:
| The challenge is knowing which one you are dealing with at any
| particular time.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| https://archive.fo/M9r4Q
| fallingmeat wrote:
| They both support discoverability in different ways
| leecarraher wrote:
| what about 3d building like structures that you fly over or into.
| mainly for amusement parks, zoos, a combination of both, and oil
| speculation supercomputers
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Tags I've always thought of conceptual while Folders are at the
| very least absolute.
|
| Let's say I'm recording events for my future travels.
| trips/paris.md and trips/cancun.md are in my folder structure
| with them tagged as business and vacation respectively. Later, I
| can go back and add a "mistakes" tag to cancun.md, but really if
| ever need to look up all my trips, I know it will be in trips and
| it's incontrovertible fact that cancun was a trip.
|
| There's room for both, but tagging historically came out of a
| need where search functions were poor. These days tagging is
| unnecessary work imo.
| fouc wrote:
| It should be possible to mimic tags with folders & clever
| scripting that moves files around according to their "tags".
|
| Imagine a command like: tagmv file1 file2
| directory1 directory2 -t tag1 tag2 tag3
|
| where it moves the files/directories to something like
| ~/t/tag1#/tag2#/tag3#/
|
| Or instead of using "#" could use some other special/rare
| character/unicode to indicate that it is a "tag-directory".
|
| The hierarchy of the tag-directories could ordered from the most
| common to least common tags. The most common tag, would have the
| tag-directory under the top level directory (something like ~/t/
| to prevent confusion with the rest of the filesystem perhaps?).
|
| The files & tag-directories could get re-organized every time the
| usage of tags changes, in order to keep the hierarchy from most
| common tags to least common.
|
| A set of tools like tagmv, tagcd, tagls, etc could work with this
| tag-based structure.
|
| Thoughts?
| mro_name wrote:
| There's a talk about such https://karl-voit.at/managing-
| digital-photographs/, there's a video.
|
| Karl seems to have a fancy TUI, I made me a cmdline helper
| https://codeberg.org/mro/Tagger.
| fouc wrote:
| I've seen that type of idea before, encoding tags within the
| file name. But as someone that lives in the terminal, I'm not
| a huge fan of cluttering up and making the file names so
| long.
| amelius wrote:
| Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good
| search algorithm.
| pphysch wrote:
| If (fuzzy) search is your primary use case, sure. But
| classification is also important for other use cases, like
| security ACLs, usage analytics, etc.
| klyrs wrote:
| SELECT * FROM desktop_icons WHERE ...
|
| I used to be one of those people who had to sort my desktop
| icons to find stuff, because there were so many icons they'd
| overlap. Today, ~/Desktop is completely empty. I've gotta say,
| folders are far superior to a rubbish bin, even when it isn't
| hard to search files by name & contents.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| If you don't know what's the name of what to search for can you
| search for it? I get that a lot of developers like the idea of
| falling back to search because most files you use can be
| searched for contents but for everyone that has to work with
| binary files it's not suitable.
|
| Johnny Decimal is also just another abstraction layer and in
| this a terrible one.
| Tagbert wrote:
| i would still want it to support tagging so that I could ensure
| that those searches picked up specifically what I wanted and
| not more random results. I've had to try to find things on
| Confluence and Sharepoint and it takes a lot of time to try to
| get what you want out of the search results.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| A good folder hierarchy is like a library: you know where it is
| even before you look for it.
| arsome wrote:
| Except when you forgot to put it in the right place because
| you just had to extract it and do that one quick thing...
|
| I'd rather not rely on my own willingness to organize files
| so I'll take a search tool any day.
| quacked wrote:
| Nah, that's when you just have an "Unsorted" folder. Sort
| that once per week. Problem solved
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This is how I treat my project (personal and work) task
| management. Throw things into the inbox as they come up
| unless I have the time to organize right then, later on
| sort into various contexts and tag them (to the extent I
| care to tag) when I have a chance. Once I've tagged it,
| it's clear of the inbox. Also how I used to use Gmail
| (back when I used the web interface, which I gave up on
| when it started crawling on my new and bleeding edge, at
| the time, desktop).
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I have two such folders: "Downloads" and "Temp". Everything
| not classified stays there until it gets moved to a
| permanent folder, or erased.
|
| I admit I sometimes search for files, but it's a filename
| search, not a content search. I don't want a background
| service indexing the files and contents of all my disks
| when I can use a regular search instead.
| wrycoder wrote:
| One needs both. With folders and trees of bookmarks, you
| can discover stuff you'd forgotten and wouldn't search for
| (because you'd forgotten you knew it once :).
|
| This becomes more important as you get older and begin to
| experience the pleasures of reading things again for the
| "first" time.
| [deleted]
| btrettel wrote:
| Probably depends on your use case, but my experience is that
| getting good results with text search often takes a lot more
| effort than tagging/classifying the documents when you get them
| would. It takes effort to craft a good query. Terminology used
| varies. "Oh, Sally uses a different term than I do, what was
| that?" If you tag or put the files into folders then you can
| standardize.
|
| I worked as a patent examiner in the past and using only text
| search for that would be considered negligent there as it would
| miss a lot of documents. I ultimately used a combination of
| text, classification, citation, and AI similarity search
| techniques. Each has strengths and weaknesses so using all of
| them makes sense.
| bityard wrote:
| I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed
| by SQLite. It resembles a wiki.
|
| First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot
| of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to
| curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them!
| It's not something you can just do once either, because every
| time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of
| tags as well. I wound up with many articles whose tags no longer
| (or never did) match the content.
|
| To get myself out of the tag-curating business, I then tried the
| "folder" idea by separating areas of concerns into namespaces.
| So, all of the Python-related notes go under the "Python"
| namespace. All of the database notes into "Databases," and so on.
| All the did was shift the problem space. Which namespace does the
| note on SQLAlchemy go in? If an article does not fit into an
| existing namespace, should I create one for it now, or put it in
| the root and hope I remember to move it if a second related note
| comes along? To put it succinctly, my notes do not fit into a
| DAG.
|
| My third iteration dropped both tags and namespaces and
| implemented the FTS5 search built into SQLite. Two years later, I
| have no regrets. The only "curation" I have to worry about is
| giving each note an accurate title and breaking up large notes
| into smaller ones when it makes sense. Now when I need something
| I just search for it and it shows up in the results.
|
| Google for all of their other faults got one thing extremely
| right when it came to web content and email: curation is a fine
| hobby but for Really Getting Shit Done, you index the content
| well and then just search for it when you need it.
| mro_name wrote:
| exactly the same sold me on spotlight search on macos. Have to
| sign "for all of their other faults got one thing extremely
| right" as well, sigh.
| BoppreH wrote:
| > To put it succinctly, my notes do not fit into a DAG.
|
| I think you mean "tree" or "hierarchy"? A DAG would be a
| superset of tagging, and could place SQLAlchemy under both
| Python and Databases, as long as you consider the edges
| oriented (i.e. there's a parent-child relationship).
|
| Doesn't solve the tag maintenance issue, though.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Technically, if their notes can't be represented by a DAG,
| they also can't be represented by a tree either.
| onion2k wrote:
| Search works brilliantly for your own notes because you know
| what you're looking for. You wrote the notes. It fails for
| problems that you can't describe well though, especially if you
| don't know the technical jargon to search for. Directories and
| tags can work for that problem because you can easily see
| relationships like a hierarchy of folders, or what other tags a
| tagged item has. Tags and folders also act as a prompt to
| classify and organise things, which occasionaly leads to
| discovering how things are connected.
|
| "How to find stuff" is a space with many solutions to similar
| looking but subtly different problems.
| telchar wrote:
| That's a nice summary of the problem and a solution I think I
| can agree with. One quibble is I think your notes could maybe
| fit into a DAG, but (as I think you meant) not a tree. In
| practice I don't think there's an easy way to do that - it
| would mean lots of sym or maybe hard linking and I don't know
| enough about filesystems to know if that's feasible.
|
| But the one area that curation carries a big advantage over
| search is in browsing. You can do maybe some things with topic
| modeling and recommendations to allow a kind of browsing, but
| with searching it's really hard to know whether you have
| thoroughly covered a part of the space via searching, while
| with hierarchical curation that is easy. Filling in that last
| part with a good solution would make searching a no brainer
| over curation I think, but IMO I don't think most search
| solutions try to handle that right now.
| viraptor wrote:
| > I wound up with many articles whose tags no longer (or never
| did) match the content.
|
| I'm curious about your tagging strategy. Could you show some
| example of this issue?
|
| I feel like my tags are very different since they're barely
| curated, but I can't imagine ending up with a "wrong" tag. I
| may miss some and have to add them later, but i can't remember
| ever removing or changing a tag. That's both in pinboard and in
| my scanned documents.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I feel like you must be implicitly tagging your notes.
|
| Let's say you have notes about SQLite. If you don't put
| "SQLite" in the note, how will you find them?
| iqanq wrote:
| select * from notes where upper(text) like '%SQLITE%' :P
| em-bee wrote:
| for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging. since i
| switched from mutt with its folders to sup which uses tags for
| email, i don't want to look back. first of all, my extensive
| list of mutt folders was trivially translated to equivalent
| tags, so i could continue as i was used to. but then, tagging
| allowed me to create additional tags as i needed them. i didn't
| tag everything, and sup also indexes all mails and also has
| search, so in fact i get the advantage of both tags and search
| (and i can save searches and treat them like virtual
| tags/folders as well).
|
| well, effectively, tags too, are just a specialized form of
| searching.
|
| the one thing i don't see is the problem with tags getting out
| of sync.
|
| yes, it happens. tags do become obsolete, but that is rarely a
| problem. it just means that i find get more results than i
| should otherwise. occasionally when i see way to many obsolete
| tags i go and clean up that particular category of tags. if it
| is just a few then i ignore them.
|
| and if i look at a tag and i don't find what i need, then i
| search for it, and add the tag when i find it so that next time
| i'll find it faster, because with more than 2 million emails in
| my archive search alone is not good enough.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| > for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging.
|
| I understand that this is a very subjective thing... but
| folders offer an exclusion which isn't immediately available
| via tagging. Tagging is _implicitly_ an _OR_ operation.
|
| Now, your search engine might offer ways to add "not X", but
| it's a tradeoff. It you have highly-compartmentalized bits of
| info you end up with the problem of "how much do have to
| explicitly exclude from my search?".
|
| It's complicated.
|
| Personally, I think we're missing a level of organization
| somehow.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| The final step GP is describing would correspond to
| notmuch[1] for mail. Have you looked into that?
|
| [1]: https://www.notmuchmail.org
| tkot wrote:
| I have settled on putting tags (bunch of words I associate with
| given subject separated by underscores) in names of
| files/directories and using FSearch
| (https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch) to search for the tags
| in names/paths.
|
| It's simple, it's portable, it's good enough. You could in theory
| improve it by having multiple views of the same data (let's say
| you want to save some notes about "Naturalis Historia" - should
| you put it under "ancient Rome" directory or under"biology"?) for
| example by using hardlinks but I don't know if there is a way to
| create a backup on another filesystem that will keep hardlinks as
| hardlinks (DAR seems promising
| http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Features.html but I have yet to try
| it).
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