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

I also put virtualenvs in a single centralized location (~/.virtualenvs), and manage their contents via Poetry.

The main reason is that I sync my Git projects via Tresorit (“encrypted Dropbox”). This lets me switch computers without committing and pushing code that is not “ready”; makes it easier to sync all projects I work on to my backup server; and lets me copy around project files that I don’t want to commit (e.g. messy WIP and TODO notes).

This doesn’t work well with virtualenvs inside a repo, because (i) the virtualenvs are not portable, and (ii) syncing a virtualenv is slow. Instead, I sync a Poetry lock file, which makes it trivial to recreate the “same” virtualenv on other machines.

I'm on MacOS, so some stuff I keep in the folders that come with an account by default.

~/Desktop/: nothing here, don't like the clutter.

~/Documents/: mainly just files stores by applications, I don't intentionally put anything here

~/Downloads/: self-explanatory, but I try to keep this clear by either deleting, cataloguing, or short-term storing everything in here.

~/Downloads/stored/: a sort of temporary "not important enough to catalogue, but I'll maybe use it more than once so I'll keep it around for now" folder.

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~/Sites/: websites that I'm working on, generally as git repos so not backed up to cloud

~/Repos/: all my other git repos not in ~/Sites/

~/Repos/external/: git repos that I don't own but that I've forked

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And then the big kahuna, where I actually store everything* that has ever been created by me digitally, which is backed up to cloud...

~/Cranium/: the root folder, which has two sub-folders

~/Cranium/cortex/: the long-term storage, well-organized "catalogue". Everything is sorted by categories and sub-categories, etc., etc. The categories right now are – archive, audio, coding, databases, design, dotfiles, edu, finance, folks, games, gimmicks, image, jobs, modeling, projects, reading, records, sparse, text, video, writing.

~/Cranium/cortex/dotfiles: This sub-folder deserves an honorable mention, because being on Unix I have a lot of dotfiles (config) that normally live in my home folder. I wrote a program that, whenever a new hidden dir/file is added to my home directory, it automatically moves it to this folder and then symlinks it back into the home directory. This makes it much easier to start up new systems and keep my settings / profiles backed up.

~/Cranium/hippocampus/: this is basically what other people would normally have on their desktop. Stuff that I generally want to keep around, but is either a very active project (and therefore want to be able to access quickly without having to click through multiple levels of organization) or is otherwise changing/ephemeral so I do not want to spend the time cataloguing these things in "cortex", lest the content and therefore desired structure changes. When something in here winds down, I either delete it or move it to "cortex".

And that's about it.

* I've started to move a lot of content into my note-taking service, as over the last couple years I've found a pure directory structure is pretty restrictive at the end of the day, even if you have spent a lot of time coming up with a flexible structure that suits you (as I have).

Neat. Ping me if you have any issues (hello@photostructure.com), please. Also: this release is coming soon: https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/

My Windows desktop will routinely be using over 20GB of RAM with just Firefox with a few tabs, not even a dozen, Discord, and Teams running. It's boggling to me that people can run hundreds of tabs, even though I have definitely seen it. Watching them fumble around trying to find the right tab is also hilarious. It's like a roulette game.