Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#101

Post by _virtu » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

I've not figured out how to organize all files on my filesystem, but at least for my notes, I found that trees just don't cut it. I ended up writing a visual studio code plugin called vscode-nested-tags that allows you to add arbitrary tags to any markdown files. These tags can also be nested ala Bear's and Notable's tag system.

I've found that this helps a lot for organization and allows me to not be constrained to the file system for organizational purposes. I found that often times, tickets for specific features turned into useful writeups about the systems that the feature touched and I wasn't able to capture that with a file tree.

The plugin can be found here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n...

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#102

Post by why-el » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

I gave upspin (the project that started at Google) a go but I found it a bit buggy. My dream with be to have $HOME be available in multiple machines, so that I can log in, start my text editor, my terminals, and everything in between, and they all pick the right configuration. If anyone is aware of such project or would like to build one, please let me know.

Of course, it must be more than just rsync, and it needs to be smart about file downloads, caching when necessary, but also not bloating machines when one is only curious in a subset.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, should ideally be open source.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#103

Post by floatingatoll » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

boltzmannbrain wrote: post #66

floatingatoll wrote: post #64

Dropbox/ contains stuff that I’ll need when I’m away from home. Downloads/ gets purged every few years of stale downloads. Documents/ gets mission-critical stuff that needs to be backed up but does not need to be in the cloud. Pictures/ has all my non-Photos photos, including a quarter terabyte of DSLR raw files. Photos and iTunes put their stuff wherever they do. I have files from 1999 in my home directory so I’m no…

> Downloads/ gets purged every few years of stale downloads. Do you have an automated way of doing this? I keep the Downloads/ finder tab open at all times so I periodically clean up.

No. I just get tired of it and sort by filesize now and then.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#104

Post by leovander » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

Someone had previously shared johnny-decimal, but I have yet to use it to reorganize my files.

https://johnnydecimal.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#105

Post by climb_stealth » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

I use Forklift [0] as a Finder replacement. I don't need most of the extra features but it is much nicer to work with.

[0] https://binarynights.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#106

Post by jimmcslim » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

leovander wrote: post #104

Someone had previously shared johnny-decimal, but I have yet to use it to reorganize my files. https://johnnydecimal.com/

Interesting.

What about customer-specific files... a small business would hope to have more than 10!

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#107

Post by acoustep » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

For code I usually use

~/Code

  ~/projects # for projects that span multiple languages

  ~/courses # For the various programming courses

  ~/valet # PHP projects using Valet+

  ~/devilbox # For Dockerized

  ~/elixir

  ~/node

  etc...

For notes I use Inkdrop and split things by hobbies/projects.

One thing I've been having trouble organising is photos. More specifically, organising original and retouched versions. I've come across one solution which is to do this:

~/Photos/

  2018/

    SpringOriginals/ # Keep original photos here.

    SpringAffinity/ # Save Affinity Photo files here

    SpringExports/ # Save exported re-touched photos here

I quite like this solution, but I'd be interested in knowing if there's anything better.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#108

Post by jimmcslim » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

climb_stealth wrote: post #105

I use Forklift [0] as a Finder replacement. I don't need most of the extra features but it is much nicer to work with. [0] https://binarynights.com/

I’ve used Path Finder [1] myself in the past.

[1] https://cocoatech.com

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#109

Post by jlarocco » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

A better description of your problem and what you're trying to achieve would get better answers.

I use the same organization on all of my machines.

Source code goes into ~/src/, each project in its own directory. In some cases I'll group projects by language in their own sub-directories, for example ~/src/lisp/

Music goes into ~/music/ with a sub-directory per artist, but some genres get their own sub-directories, with artist sub-directories under that.

Photos go on a dedicated external hard drive.

Books and PDFs go into ~/books/, or one of the topic based sub-directories underneath it.

Everything else goes into sensibly named sub-directories in $HOME. If I get a lot of similar directories (2018-taxes, 2017-taxes, etc.) I'll group them in a sub-directory.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#110

Post by rootbear » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

k2enemy wrote: post #39

I don't use the Documents folder and have it `chflags hidden` in the Finder. Desktop is always empty. `data` contains documents, while `db` contains databases and datasets for research. `var` is mostly vm images. The others I think are self explanatory. `work` and `src` are synced to my linux computer at work via syncthing. [k2enemy@indy ~]$ tree -L 1 . ├── Desktop ├── Documents ├── Downloads ├── Library ├── Movies ├…

I take a somewhat similar approach, where I replicate standard Unix/Linux directories in my home directory: src, lib, etc, bin. It works pretty well, but has some limitations.