Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#11

Post by mmmBacon » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

On Mac, I don’t really bother with too much file organization. I have some broad categories but really not more than 1 or 2 folders deep. Stuff that doesn’t fit into those categories just goes in the folder with everything else. Although, I put all presentations in the same folder. I mostly use spotlight for files navigation.

On Windows, I find I need to spend more time organizing as the search seems to be substantially worse than spotlight. Search is still my go to though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#12

Post by jwong_ » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #10

~/Documents/$(YYYYMM)/ mostly for personal stuff. I have a Makefile rule in ~/Makefile that moves ~/Desktop/* there periodically. I also have ~/Documents/eeqj/$(YYYYMM)/ for my revenue-related files, and ~/Documents/eeqj/$(YYYYMMDD).$(PROJECTNAME)/ for specific projects.

Could you share that makefile? That sounds exactly like how I'd like to manage my desktop.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#13

Post by notatoad » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

i dump them in my homedir for a while, and then periodically delete old stuff.

i've never felt a need to organize my files as files. if it's important enough to organize, it's important enough to put in a wiki or git repo or some more structured way of organizing things than files on a filesystem.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#14

Post by mjayhn » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

PDFs and reference material not written by me is stored in mendeley/zotero (I'm using both right now) so it's easily cross referenced and text searchable across my devices and I'll have my reference material at any job I go to. My background is engineering not research but when I discovered these tools my note taking/referencing skyrocketed. I put every worthwhile pdf I find in it. I've begun following a lot more research/science types lately to learn their systems because it's stuff I never really encountered on this end of tech.

Code is in ~/workspace which is typically ~/workspace/$company/$github-repos

My markdown docs (snippets, research) are in ~/workspace/docs/$whatimresearching

I do everything out of my workspace. This lowers the amount of cruft I have to move between systems when migrating. Mostly dotfiles and ~/workspace and I'm good to go. And I keep offline backups of course.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#15

Post by glup » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

At this point, I've decided 75%+ of stuff is transitory and doesn't deserve the time to be filed into a hierarchical local file system, so I just leave it all in Downloads on OS X. Github, Overleaf, Google Docs, and email has all the critical stuff. And of course I have full backups for years. This horrifies some people, but has worked well for me for about 5 years.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#16

Post by EvanAnderson » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

For anything organized by date using ISO 8601-inspired date formats (yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss) is supremely helpful.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#17

Post by wand3r » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

I liked this ted talk on organizing. The heuristics they use could be applied to digital folders as well. I guess its tangentially related but i found it a quite interesting listen.

Edit: https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_griffiths_3_ways_to_make_bette...

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#18

Post by cercatrova » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

sixhobbits wrote: post #4

`ag -g 'some-piece-of-the-name-that-seems-kind-of-likely'` [0] [0] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

You should try ripgrep

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#19

Post by codemac » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

I very dutifully curate my text files, but for everything else I always struggled to follow the GTD "Reference" alpha system.

Tiago Forte has a system called PARA:

- Projects

- Areas

- Resources

- Archive

This is just enough structure for me to know where things are. The hardest part to me is there are things that cross the Areas/Resources boundary.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?

#20

Post by egypturnash » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

By project. https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/01/06/how-i-work-file-org... goes into more detail. I am an artist, so perhaps what works for me won't work for programmers - but I am also an artist who self-publishes comics, which are huge projects that sprawl across multiple files and programs.

References go into a few directories, there are some vaguely sorted directories of inspirational images, books go into an "ebooks" directory that has a few broad categories in it, mostly I just go to that directory and type what I'm looking for into OSX's search bar.

When I do commissions, reference images generally get dropped into the Illustrator file and deleted from the filesystem.