3 ms·

I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too? Example.

• DLWormwood 18y ago
  > I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too? What's weird is that the very first file system the Mac used was very close to this. MFS didn't support true directories; folders were an illusion provided by the Finder. Be OS, I believe, was the closest to your ideal that was ever developed, but it was considered too alien and "late" for it to have ever gotten traction. Just like the automobile got saddled with the internal combustion engine and manual wheel-based control, personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems.
  • jrockway 18y ago
    personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems And UNIX. Can I have my Lisp machine back, please? (OK, so I never had a Lisp machine. But I want one :P)
    • eru 18y ago
      But with lexical scoping!
• potatolicious 18y ago
  MacOS's spotlight feature is somewhat close to what you're describing - and it can be extended to index/search metadata from file formats not in its default list. That being said, it would be nice if such abilities can be extended to 3rd party developers, so that I can query the OS with a string and have relevant files come back.
• cabalamat 18y ago
  What I would like is something like that: a hierarchial file system that also have metadata like you describe. So you'd be able to access files in the traditional way, but there would also be an API (and gui and command line tools) that would return all files matching criteria in the metadata.
  • anthonyrubin 18y ago
    Such file systems already exist. Take a look at HFS+ and Spotlight in OS X Leopard. It is not the only example.