By project, by tool? What do you do with pdfs and reference stuff, surely not Dewey Decimal?
Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#2Does the total time searching for files exceed the time it would take to meticulously organize them?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#3Exactly how the default application organizes them, whether they are documents, source code, built artifacts or whatever. I have more to do in life than agonize over that.
In fact, where you hang your ornaments (files) on the ceremonial file Christmas tree (file/directory/parent directory tree) is the least interesting part about files.
I'd far, far rather have a rich set of attributes and a way to create relations over them. "All the files I printed by date", "emails I received from so-and-so", "attachments by destination" and so on. Real relationships I actually care about.
This is one of my hot buttons, can you tell?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#4`ag -g 'some-piece-of-the-name-that-seems-kind-of-likely'` [0]
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#5Why should I with all the search available?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#6I share mine here https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/unix/my-file-system
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#7`ag -g 'some-piece-of-the-name-that-seems-kind-of-likely'` [0] [0] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
fzf piped to xargs. Fzf is a fuzzy interactive string search, by default searches path names below current directory. Allows selecting multiple entries with --multi
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#8Last summer I worked at an art gallery. It was my first time working on a shared file server and it was a mess—except for the exhibition files.
There was a main “exhibitions” folder. Inside of that was a folder for every show in the gallery’s history.
Each of these was named starting with the year of the show + another number indicating whether it was the first show of the year, or the second, etc.
There was a somewhat standard structure for what you would find inside of each of these (contracts, artists bios, press photos, etc), but it didn’t really matter because there were few enough files that it was easy to browse.
After a couple of weeks, I went home and organized my projects and documents according to the same pattern. I find things faster now.
The keys are this: (1) broad top-level categories (“exhibitions”) (2) dated folders (3) shallow structure inside dated folders (files in root or one folder deep)
This pattern makes it easy to know where to put things, and Easy to browse. Find the category you want, then the date range you want. Now you’re only have a few folder names to read. Browsing the files inside of there might take a little while if there’s a lot, but usually there won’t be. And you can relax because if the file exists, it’s gotta be in here.
(Or maybe one other place—sometimes files don’t make it out of “Downloads,” and sometimes I have to check both “Art” and “Design” before I find the project I’m looking for. But that’s ok, because dated folders makes that easy to do.)
Others will suggest giving up and relying on search. Search is great, but it only works for files you know (or remember!) exist. Build a simpLe browsable structure and you can find things you’ve forgotten about, or tell collaborators where to look for things they want.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#9Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
#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.