4 ms·

I'm more upset there are no filesystems where I can organize files by applying labels to them, similar to how one can apply labels to email in Gmail.

mbell 14y ago
You can do this on a mac (Finder labels are stored in HFS+ metadata).
- shurcooL 14y ago
  To some degree, yes, but the UI for it is too awkward to be usable. It's not as first class citizen as creating folders and putting files in folders.
sdrinf 14y ago
Not quite sure if you really want that: open your favorite shell, and count the number of files in your data directory; then multiply it by, say, 2 seconds each -would you like to spend that time on organization, or rather making money? (obviously you can apply the same label to multiple files, but you still need to figure out what belongs to where). Personally, I gave up on manual organization of my file system last year, and learned how to love built-in search. This works great, as the rough index is in your head anyways, so you can just take a single token of the filename, type it in, and open it up; massively reducing both access time, and eliminating organization entirely.
- shurcooL 14y ago
  I only want to manually apply labels only to some files/folders. I have some parts of the same project spread out through 3 folders: not in Dropbox, in Dropbox, in Public subfolder of Dropbox. It'd be really nice to have a unified view on those things. As in apply 'Dropbox' or 'Dropbox/Public' labels to some files. I know Dropbox has shared links, but I don't want to have to create and manage those all the time. It's just an example. Finally, I think a great way to organize files is by time created/modified. If you exclude the system or program generated files. Quite often I just want to find a file that I know I saved a few days ago (but no idea in which folder).
  - inquist 14y ago
    Save everything in one folder. Optionally set up (symbolic) links in other locations.
  - archivator 14y ago
    Symlinks. Put all three folders under a common parent. Then, put symlinks inside your Dropbox pointing to the relevant parts of the project.
bnegreve 14y ago
Well, it isn't really a matter of file system since it is possible to implement "tags" on any FS using links. (i.e. by creating directories named after tags and by populating these directories with links to the actual files.) Therefore what you need isn't a new file system but a file system browser that allows you to specify a (set of) file(s) using tags. Considering how easy it would be to do just this using fuse, I'd guess some Linux folks already tried this, does anyone know about projects in this line?
- hkolek 14y ago
  Not really the approach you describe but quite some time ago I came across an experimental project which used a C implementation of Apache Lucene (I think that was called Lucy) to implement a new approach to file management, based on full-text search, where you don't store the files in a hierarchy but use more a concept liket tags and what a file is about and stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool and the demo I tried worked pretty well for me. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore and can't remember the name or anything. I think this is a very interesting approach.
e12e 14y ago
I wonder how an implementation of this using extended attributes (xattr) would scale? I couldn't find much information on anyone doing this before, except one command line/emacs tool: https://github.com/chujoii/xattr-tag/ I suppose adding a gtk-gui on top of this would be possible. As well as an explanation (of sorts) for why there doesn't appear to be support for (x)attrs in GNU find: http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/wNWnxu100AzH1ItS2Dk5 "find" can filter based on -exec -- but there doesn't appear to be a simple command that will take a filename, an attribute (and optional value) and simply return 0 if found, other if not found (not that it should be hard to write, based off the attr-utilities code, for instance).
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Google Docs used to do that (maybe it still does). It was absolute chaos and very confusing.
networked 14y ago
The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (the man who, among other things, coined the term "hypertext") and others. However, it goes even further back than that with the critique of library indexing systems by Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 article As We May Think [1] that described the "Memex" as an alternative: a system that to today's eyes might look something like a PDF viewer with chained bidirectional links (think '90s web rings, only for book and magazine pages), which were called "trails". There have been attempts to remedy those problems by both individuals like Nelson [2] and corporations like Be, Inc. [3] and Microsoft (which may or may not be related to the fact that Nelson's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines was very influential at early Microsoft and Microsoft Press even republished it). It truly is lamentable that Microsoft didn't bring one into the mainstream with WinFS [4]. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... [2] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736 http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736, http://www.xanadu.com/ http://www.xanadu.com/ [3] http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf, Chapter 5 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- Terretta 14y ago
  Bill Gates' recent Reddit Ask Me Anything he said his biggest regret was not doing WinFS. Q: What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market? Gates: We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding. -- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...
ersii 14y ago
In BFS (Be(OS?) File System) you can add any kind of attribute to a file, for what I know. Unfortunally, this isn't very helpful - since you need to run either BeOS or Haiku. If I'm not mistaken, there's a FUSE port of BFS to Linux as well.
Terretta 14y ago
OSX supports this today with metadata and spotlight driven smart folders.

mbell 14y ago

You can do this on a mac (Finder labels are stored in HFS+ metadata).

shurcooL 14y ago
To some degree, yes, but the UI for it is too awkward to be usable. It's not as first class citizen as creating folders and putting files in folders.

sdrinf 14y ago

Not quite sure if you really want that: open your favorite shell, and count the number of files in your data directory; then multiply it by, say, 2 seconds each -would you like to spend that time on organization, or rather making money? (obviously you can apply the same label to multiple files, but you still need to figure out what belongs to where). Personally, I gave up on manual organization of my file system last year, and learned how to love built-in search. This works great, as the rough index is in your head anyways, so you can just take a single token of the filename, type it in, and open it up; massively reducing both access time, and eliminating organization entirely.

shurcooL 14y ago
I only want to manually apply labels only to some files/folders. I have some parts of the same project spread out through 3 folders: not in Dropbox, in Dropbox, in Public subfolder of Dropbox. It'd be really nice to have a unified view on those things. As in apply 'Dropbox' or 'Dropbox/Public' labels to some files. I know Dropbox has shared links, but I don't want to have to create and manage those all the time. It's just an example. Finally, I think a great way to organize files is by time created/modified. If you exclude the system or program generated files. Quite often I just want to find a file that I know I saved a few days ago (but no idea in which folder).
- inquist 14y ago
  Save everything in one folder. Optionally set up (symbolic) links in other locations.
- archivator 14y ago
  Symlinks. Put all three folders under a common parent. Then, put symlinks inside your Dropbox pointing to the relevant parts of the project.

bnegreve 14y ago

Well, it isn't really a matter of file system since it is possible to implement "tags" on any FS using links. (i.e. by creating directories named after tags and by populating these directories with links to the actual files.) Therefore what you need isn't a new file system but a file system browser that allows you to specify a (set of) file(s) using tags. Considering how easy it would be to do just this using fuse, I'd guess some Linux folks already tried this, does anyone know about projects in this line?

hkolek 14y ago
Not really the approach you describe but quite some time ago I came across an experimental project which used a C implementation of Apache Lucene (I think that was called Lucy) to implement a new approach to file management, based on full-text search, where you don't store the files in a hierarchy but use more a concept liket tags and what a file is about and stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool and the demo I tried worked pretty well for me. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore and can't remember the name or anything. I think this is a very interesting approach.

e12e 14y ago

I wonder how an implementation of this using extended attributes (xattr) would scale? I couldn't find much information on anyone doing this before, except one command line/emacs tool: https://github.com/chujoii/xattr-tag/ I suppose adding a gtk-gui on top of this would be possible. As well as an explanation (of sorts) for why there doesn't appear to be support for (x)attrs in GNU find: http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/wNWnxu100AzH1ItS2Dk5 "find" can filter based on -exec -- but there doesn't appear to be a simple command that will take a filename, an attribute (and optional value) and simply return 0 if found, other if not found (not that it should be hard to write, based off the attr-utilities code, for instance).

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

Google Docs used to do that (maybe it still does). It was absolute chaos and very confusing.

networked 14y ago

The fact that file systems force us to organize data a into a set of named files in a fairly rigid hierarchy has been lamented since the 1970s by Ted Nelson (the man who, among other things, coined the term "hypertext") and others. However, it goes even further back than that with the critique of library indexing systems by Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 article As We May Think [1] that described the "Memex" as an alternative: a system that to today's eyes might look something like a PDF viewer with chained bidirectional links (think '90s web rings, only for book and magazine pages), which were called "trails". There have been attempts to remedy those problems by both individuals like Nelson [2] and corporations like Be, Inc. [3] and Microsoft (which may or may not be related to the fact that Nelson's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines was very influential at early Microsoft and Microsoft Press even republished it). It truly is lamentable that Microsoft didn't bring one into the mainstream with WinFS [4]. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... [2] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736 http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6262736, http://www.xanadu.com/ http://www.xanadu.com/ [3] http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf, Chapter 5 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Terretta 14y ago
Bill Gates' recent Reddit Ask Me Anything he said his biggest regret was not doing WinFS. Q: What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market? Gates: We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding. -- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...

ersii 14y ago

In BFS (Be(OS?) File System) you can add any kind of attribute to a file, for what I know. Unfortunally, this isn't very helpful - since you need to run either BeOS or Haiku. If I'm not mistaken, there's a FUSE port of BFS to Linux as well.

Terretta 14y ago

OSX supports this today with metadata and spotlight driven smart folders.