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>These different types of files usually call for different hierarchies I organize my files by subject, not file type. My files about space stuff go in a direc

>These different types of files usually call for different hierarchies I organize my files by subject, not file type. My files about space stuff go in a directory called 'space'. Files about the space shuttle go in space/shuttle. This directory contains any sort of file related to the space shuttle, be it picture, video, pdf, epub, or otherwise. I don't see any utility in breaking this directory apart into ~/Pictures/shuttle, ~/Videos/shuttle, ~/Documents/shuttle... Do you really do something like that? How far do you take this "different files, different hierarchies" principle? Do pdfs and docx go in two different hierarchies too? Are pngs and jpegs separated? What's your criteria for deciding when different sorts of files get different hierarchies?

bscphil 4y ago
What I do is probably more similar to you than you realize. I'm not categorically placing all images in ~/Pictures, rather I'm using that directory primarily for pictures that I've taken. Each photo taking session gets its own sub-directory with the ISO 8601 date followed by a description of the event. This is extremely convenient because software I use (like raw image developers) automatically knows to look in ~/Pictures and I can access my files right away. Likewise, I'm not using ~/Documents just for stuff with an .odt or .pdf extension. Rather, any sort of human-readable text based file goes there. I have some markdown files that have embedded images, and of course the .png or .svg files exist alongside them in the relevant directories. ~/Music is probably the best example of why the default XDG approach makes sense. You can place everything in an Artist/Album hierarchy, and most music software is written to automatically pick up and scan these directories to keep their internal libraries in sync. There's no fuss. I don't limit myself to just the XDG directories when there's not a close fit; i also have a ~/Projects for various things I've made and ~/Programs for statically built programs that can't be installed, and so on. Basically, I've found that the XDG approach does a pretty good job of splitting up files by purpose, allowing you to compartmentalize by avoiding having too many directories at the top level of the hierarchy.

bscphil 4y ago

What I do is probably more similar to you than you realize. I'm not categorically placing all images in ~/Pictures, rather I'm using that directory primarily for pictures that I've taken. Each photo taking session gets its own sub-directory with the ISO 8601 date followed by a description of the event. This is extremely convenient because software I use (like raw image developers) automatically knows to look in ~/Pictures and I can access my files right away. Likewise, I'm not using ~/Documents just for stuff with an .odt or .pdf extension. Rather, any sort of human-readable text based file goes there. I have some markdown files that have embedded images, and of course the .png or .svg files exist alongside them in the relevant directories. ~/Music is probably the best example of why the default XDG approach makes sense. You can place everything in an Artist/Album hierarchy, and most music software is written to automatically pick up and scan these directories to keep their internal libraries in sync. There's no fuss. I don't limit myself to just the XDG directories when there's not a close fit; i also have a ~/Projects for various things I've made and ~/Programs for statically built programs that can't be installed, and so on. Basically, I've found that the XDG approach does a pretty good job of splitting up files by purpose, allowing you to compartmentalize by avoiding having too many directories at the top level of the hierarchy.