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Right, this seems to me to be a tiling window manager with a touch interface. This is kind of an odd combination too, because most tiling WMs are keyboard orien

Right, this seems to me to be a tiling window manager with a touch interface. This is kind of an odd combination too, because most tiling WMs are keyboard oriented, whereas most non-tiling WMs are pointer oriented. Maybe that's just historical and doesn't really make much of a difference though. But with i3, I have keybindings to "open the last browser window i used" or "open the last gvim window i opened." I can tile them in different workspaces as I please extremely efficiently and quickly, and move them around as needed. I can move much faster using the keyboard than when I'm in my Windows machine. Having this tiling ability on a tablet seems odd to me. I am kind of getting tired of the "attacks" on the traditional desktop interface. People just don't want to admit that just because tablets exist they are not a superior interface. Just a different one. The interface they propose is beautiful but it would really have to walk a thin, thin line between usability and screen space. I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. Obviously then you get into the problem of managing your tags (a tree-based filesystem solves this problem naturally).

grp 11y ago
In case, for the tag-based filesystem, there are tmsu [1]. I will try it soon with ranger [2], I think managing tags with it won't be a problem as you can call the shell where you want. [1] http://tmsu.org/ http://tmsu.org/ [2] http://ranger.nongnu.org/ http://ranger.nongnu.org/
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Looks great but what happens when you move files from one system to another? Can one keep the tags?
  - rakoo 11y ago
    It looks like it's "hard" to do correctly, so TMSU doesn't do any magic but will try it's best through the "repair" command: https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-detect-file-moves-and-renames https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-de...
stormbrew 11y ago
I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 (which I use on all my daily-use machines), and I would be extremely happy to augment it with touch screen support (which I would largely want to use for tile manipulation). In fact, a main reason I use i3 is because it is literally the least ideological tiling window manager when it comes to mouse use. The productivity gains I get out of tiling don't come from using the keyboard, they come from not having to deal with the (imo, especially in the post-1024x768 era) very messy overlapping window model. Things are where I expect. I can move them from one screen to another and sane things happen. Plugging in and unplugging a display doesn't make hash of my organization. Things are never buried under incomprehensible layers. And so on.
- joepvd 11y ago
  > I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 (which I use on all my daily-use machines), and I would be extremely happy to augment it with touch screen support (which I would largely want to use for tile manipulation). This sounds interesting. Would you care to elaborate?
- girvo 11y ago
  > I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 I agree, it was one of the things I was missing back when I was using i3 + Ubuntu as my daily machine. Now, I'm using OS X with Amethyst[1], which while it's less powerful than i3, combined with OS X's window management features I honestly feel like I get the best of both worlds. It's quite great, to be honest. [1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
zanny 11y ago
I know at least KDE's Baloo indexer uses tags on files when available. If I search for the word "cookie" I get every filed named cookie, anything tagged cookie, contacts, bookmarks, and any parsable text document containing cookie including emails and IM logs. I think the broader problem is that there is this awkward question of where tags belong in the application heirarchy. Right now most media files embed tags while text files do not. Binary files certainly do not, and folders are not true files and thus are not on-disk things to put tags on, they are usually filesystem constructs in a data tree somewhere. Your file indexer could maintain the tags database, but then they are not file-portable. They could be part of the extended file traits in your filesystem, but then filesystems lacking support (including online uploads) would drop them. Thus we are at a point where tagging is done on a per-format basis, and thus some files are just not taggable but instead require indexing. You would probably want to throw a semantic relevancy engine on top of that to associate vocabulary with similar terms, so if i search for food i can get things like cookie as a related search term.
danseagrave 11y ago
Talk of tag/DB based file systems always reminds me of WinFS[1]. Microsoft were trying to build a tag (well relational database) backed file system since 1990... eventually abandoned - presumably due to back-compat issues. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- jpfed 11y ago
  Lots of reading material about the conception and death of WinFS: http://www.metafilter.com/134799/WinFS-what-it-could-have-been-and-why-it-failed http://www.metafilter.com/134799/WinFS-what-it-could-have-be...
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
>I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. // Ditto, I use tags heavily for web content and photos and would love to do the same for local files. Seems that it might be possible to overload soft-links to do the job - create a hierarchy of tags and then put a soft link for each file in the relevant place. That way you could use current filesystems and filemanagers whilst you develop the concept and apps. Someone mentioned file searches in Ubuntu (using Baloo) but the default file manager needs to have an interface to apply tags as a MVP og file tagging.
- kijin 11y ago
  I want hierarchical tags, e.g. "comp.lang.ruby.rails" instead of just "ruby" and "rails". And of course, when I search "comp.lang.ruby", I want to see results from all of its children. The problem with traditional hierarchical organization is that objects often belong to multiple categories. With hierarchical tags, that problem disappears because you can easily assign multiple tags to the same object. Actually, we can already do this with hierarchical filesystems and hard (not soft) links.
  - mynewtb 11y ago
    Do they really have to be hierarchical? Your example would work with AND.
    - kijin 11y ago
      What if I have two dozen ruby-related tags, not just rails? In order to search all of them without hierarchical tags, I would have to either add the "ruby" tag to all of them, or run a search with a lot of ANDs. I already do this to some extent with my 11,000+ bookmarks on Pinboard. Entering the Usenet-style tags is really easy thanks to autocomplete, which also helps me avoid ending up with misspelled tags. Pinboard currently lacks searching by tag prefix, but it's trivial to script it locally using the API.

grp 11y ago

In case, for the tag-based filesystem, there are tmsu [1]. I will try it soon with ranger [2], I think managing tags with it won't be a problem as you can call the shell where you want. [1] http://tmsu.org/ http://tmsu.org/ [2] http://ranger.nongnu.org/ http://ranger.nongnu.org/

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Looks great but what happens when you move files from one system to another? Can one keep the tags?
- rakoo 11y ago
  It looks like it's "hard" to do correctly, so TMSU doesn't do any magic but will try it's best through the "repair" command: https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-detect-file-moves-and-renames https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-de...

stormbrew 11y ago

I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 (which I use on all my daily-use machines), and I would be extremely happy to augment it with touch screen support (which I would largely want to use for tile manipulation). In fact, a main reason I use i3 is because it is literally the least ideological tiling window manager when it comes to mouse use. The productivity gains I get out of tiling don't come from using the keyboard, they come from not having to deal with the (imo, especially in the post-1024x768 era) very messy overlapping window model. Things are where I expect. I can move them from one screen to another and sane things happen. Plugging in and unplugging a display doesn't make hash of my organization. Things are never buried under incomprehensible layers. And so on.

joepvd 11y ago
> I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 (which I use on all my daily-use machines), and I would be extremely happy to augment it with touch screen support (which I would largely want to use for tile manipulation). This sounds interesting. Would you care to elaborate?
girvo 11y ago
> I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 I agree, it was one of the things I was missing back when I was using i3 + Ubuntu as my daily machine. Now, I'm using OS X with Amethyst[1], which while it's less powerful than i3, combined with OS X's window management features I honestly feel like I get the best of both worlds. It's quite great, to be honest. [1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

zanny 11y ago

I know at least KDE's Baloo indexer uses tags on files when available. If I search for the word "cookie" I get every filed named cookie, anything tagged cookie, contacts, bookmarks, and any parsable text document containing cookie including emails and IM logs. I think the broader problem is that there is this awkward question of where tags belong in the application heirarchy. Right now most media files embed tags while text files do not. Binary files certainly do not, and folders are not true files and thus are not on-disk things to put tags on, they are usually filesystem constructs in a data tree somewhere. Your file indexer could maintain the tags database, but then they are not file-portable. They could be part of the extended file traits in your filesystem, but then filesystems lacking support (including online uploads) would drop them. Thus we are at a point where tagging is done on a per-format basis, and thus some files are just not taggable but instead require indexing. You would probably want to throw a semantic relevancy engine on top of that to associate vocabulary with similar terms, so if i search for food i can get things like cookie as a related search term.

danseagrave 11y ago

Talk of tag/DB based file systems always reminds me of WinFS[1]. Microsoft were trying to build a tag (well relational database) backed file system since 1990... eventually abandoned - presumably due to back-compat issues. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

jpfed 11y ago
Lots of reading material about the conception and death of WinFS: http://www.metafilter.com/134799/WinFS-what-it-could-have-been-and-why-it-failed http://www.metafilter.com/134799/WinFS-what-it-could-have-be...

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

>I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. // Ditto, I use tags heavily for web content and photos and would love to do the same for local files. Seems that it might be possible to overload soft-links to do the job - create a hierarchy of tags and then put a soft link for each file in the relevant place. That way you could use current filesystems and filemanagers whilst you develop the concept and apps. Someone mentioned file searches in Ubuntu (using Baloo) but the default file manager needs to have an interface to apply tags as a MVP og file tagging.

kijin 11y ago
I want hierarchical tags, e.g. "comp.lang.ruby.rails" instead of just "ruby" and "rails". And of course, when I search "comp.lang.ruby", I want to see results from all of its children. The problem with traditional hierarchical organization is that objects often belong to multiple categories. With hierarchical tags, that problem disappears because you can easily assign multiple tags to the same object. Actually, we can already do this with hierarchical filesystems and hard (not soft) links.
- mynewtb 11y ago
  Do they really have to be hierarchical? Your example would work with AND.
  - kijin 11y ago
    What if I have two dozen ruby-related tags, not just rails? In order to search all of them without hierarchical tags, I would have to either add the "ruby" tag to all of them, or run a search with a lot of ANDs. I already do this to some extent with my 11,000+ bookmarks on Pinboard. Entering the Usenet-style tags is really easy thanks to autocomplete, which also helps me avoid ending up with misspelled tags. Pinboard currently lacks searching by tag prefix, but it's trivial to script it locally using the API.