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There's https://dystroy.org/broot/ https://dystroy.org/broot/ Are those fancy tree displays actually useful for anything or is just pretty?

ShamelessC 7y ago
Yeah I think it's obvious that graphical trees are prettier than they are effective user interfaces. Broot is a good example of just how much effort goes into making nested structures easily navigable. Trees may be good for presentation but ultimately lists with indentation for nesting are for more navigable. This translates to GUI concepts as well. Both Windows and MacOS show a few flat lists relative to the current directory rather than showing all nestings at once like a tree does.
anigbrowl 7y ago
That's for console use. Trees are useful for looking at the whole thing at once, much as it's easier to appreciate a real tree that way than by maintaining a list of the leaves and branching distances. I'm a a researcher and my source material is ~50gb spread across ~50k hand-picked files with pretty arbitrary structure, plus another 4-5 times that in mirrors of other collections. Trees let me see things that I would overlook by reading lists all the time. Right now I half-ass use some bioinformatics tools originally intended for cladistics and proteome research to visualize the collection. Some days I go looking for specific information or catalog what I have, other days I stumble across a cache of valuable data and might select hundreds of individual files.
- j88439h84 7y ago
  I'm having trouble imagining this. Would you be able to show a screenshot?
  - ORioN63 7y ago
    Not OP, but I'm guessing it's something similar to how I watched fast moving logs to look for anomalies: I reduced text size enough, to a point it wasn't really text I was looking, but patterns of line content and length. This was enough to see that things were running proper.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    I use a piece of software called Dendroscope to kick out circular cladograms, as documented here: https://software-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/download/dendroscope/manual.pdf https://software-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/download/den... It works OK, but it means directory listings first have to be kicked into a Newick tree format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format I use a variety of other graph-based tools too, such as Maltego, Gephi, and Cytoscape, but to be honest I do so in a very ad-hoc way for specific tranches of data ( afile collection, or a relevant social media stream) and keep most of it my head. Otherwise I will get hung up on tooling rather than the underlying material.

ShamelessC 7y ago

Yeah I think it's obvious that graphical trees are prettier than they are effective user interfaces. Broot is a good example of just how much effort goes into making nested structures easily navigable. Trees may be good for presentation but ultimately lists with indentation for nesting are for more navigable. This translates to GUI concepts as well. Both Windows and MacOS show a few flat lists relative to the current directory rather than showing all nestings at once like a tree does.

anigbrowl 7y ago

That's for console use. Trees are useful for looking at the whole thing at once, much as it's easier to appreciate a real tree that way than by maintaining a list of the leaves and branching distances. I'm a a researcher and my source material is ~50gb spread across ~50k hand-picked files with pretty arbitrary structure, plus another 4-5 times that in mirrors of other collections. Trees let me see things that I would overlook by reading lists all the time. Right now I half-ass use some bioinformatics tools originally intended for cladistics and proteome research to visualize the collection. Some days I go looking for specific information or catalog what I have, other days I stumble across a cache of valuable data and might select hundreds of individual files.

j88439h84 7y ago
I'm having trouble imagining this. Would you be able to show a screenshot?
- ORioN63 7y ago
  Not OP, but I'm guessing it's something similar to how I watched fast moving logs to look for anomalies: I reduced text size enough, to a point it wasn't really text I was looking, but patterns of line content and length. This was enough to see that things were running proper.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  I use a piece of software called Dendroscope to kick out circular cladograms, as documented here: https://software-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/download/dendroscope/manual.pdf https://software-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/download/den... It works OK, but it means directory listings first have to be kicked into a Newick tree format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format I use a variety of other graph-based tools too, such as Maltego, Gephi, and Cytoscape, but to be honest I do so in a very ad-hoc way for specific tranches of data ( afile collection, or a relevant social media stream) and keep most of it my head. Otherwise I will get hung up on tooling rather than the underlying material.