Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

tmsu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 131 posts

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#61

Post by jandrese »

dTal wrote: post #58
jandrese wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting chart appears on the Wiki explaining how Microsoft keeps tilting at this windmill and has two decades of cancelled or scaled back products to show for it. I suspect there is an inherent scaling problem with the approach. While it demos well and can be useful in a lab setting, the full scale version ends up being so complex that mere mortals aren't able to comprehend it and end up just losing their file…

I can imagine such a thing; it's called a programming language. A GUI application, you say? Well then you're just asking for a graphical programming language, and as they say, now you have two problems... I think the more general-purpose a tool is, the more intelligence and/or general knowledge is needed to wield it: "Here's a widget thromper. You push the big green button and it thromps the widgets." vs "Here's a ca…

Ok, we need you to work on the music for this TV show. Your first job will of course be to build your composition suite from scratch so you can access our incredibly complicated database oriented file storage system.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#62

Post by blakeyrat »

kpil wrote: post #18
zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I agree. I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds. The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it. Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans…

> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies,

Humans also track a lot of things based on spatial memory, which no OS since Mac Classic has even tried to make use of, which is a shame.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#63

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

This is actually kind of akin to BeFS. Although BeFS had greater capabilities in some ways, being an actual filesystem. For the uninitiated, BeFS was the native filesystem of BeOS, and allowed for metadata attributes that allowed for querying and indexing capabilities akin to an relational DB. Or at least, that's what Wikipedia says.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#64

Post by GauntletWizard »

seagreen wrote: post #21

A great idea! I think tags are definitely a better way to organize most personal data than trees. Also I like that they describe what data they actually change on your computer right on the homepage: "TMSU does not alter your files in any way: they remain unchanged on disk, or on the network, wherever you put them. TMSU maintains its own database and you simply gain an additional view, which you can mount, based upon…

I've been considering writing something similar myself, and my plan had been to hardlink the files by their hash into my blobstore. It won't fix the move/modification case, but it would solve the problem for simple moves. But I guess they're trying to deal with remote filesystems, too, and I was not targeting those.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#65

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

Yeah. I just want my files in directories, save maybe music, where I might want to query by various tags. But beets already can do that. Or I suppose I could build an app to build a static index off of a master, but again, why would I do that when I can use beets?

All of the other files I work with on a day to day basis I don't really want to query by structure or tags. I just want to know where the %^&*@ they ARE! And a simple hierarchy is actually better than tags for that.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#66

Post by dTal »

jandrese wrote: post #61
dTal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine such a thing; it's called a programming language. A GUI application, you say? Well then you're just asking for a graphical programming language, and as they say, now you have two problems... I think the more general-purpose a tool is, the more intelligence and/or general knowledge is needed to wield it: "Here's a widget thromper. You push the big green button and it thromps the widgets." vs "Here's a ca…

Ok, we need you to work on the music for this TV show. Your first job will of course be to build your composition suite from scratch so you can access our incredibly complicated database oriented file storage system.

If you're competent with your language, you don't always need to build a special purpose tool with it to do work - you can use it directly. You picked an example where a) libraries are lacking (high level audio manipulation) and b) good special purpose tools exist, but it's entirely possible to find tasks for which these things aren't true. The whole idea of shell scripts as a basic tool, or IPython/Jupyter as a reasonable interface to a variety of tasks, is based on this concept.

In my last "proper" job, I wrote a lot of code, and the vast majority was one-off; virtually none of it ended up in what you might call an "application".

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#67

Post by fh973 »

This idea is rediscovered every few years in a new project. I tried this with StorageBox many years ago and even did some UX research in this context. Turns out many users don't like querying only as it they feel they can not search their data exhaustively, and might "lose" some of their data this way.

Also for not tech savvy users, folders have the nice interaction pattern of question-response via menu selection. They see something, click, see something, click, without realizing that they are navigating a folder hierarchy.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#68

Post by choosername »

kpil wrote: post #18
zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I agree. I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds. The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it. Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans…

>Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, ...

Well, sure, if things do have a hierarchical relationship, but a hierarchy is just one form of network. It fails for concurrent dependency problems, e.g.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#69

Post by kujenga »

zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I hear you there! If you're looking for a tool that scratches that itch, I've spent the last year and a half working on a could based search engine that spans all services and devices.

We inherit all the information from your existing file system structure, as well as the people files are shared with, and provide a powerful content-based search on top of that.

Check out our website if you'd like: https://www.meta.sc

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#70

Post by Already__Taken »

fh973 wrote: post #67

This idea is rediscovered every few years in a new project. I tried this with StorageBox many years ago and even did some UX research in this context. Turns out many users don't like querying only as it they feel they can not search their data exhaustively, and might "lose" some of their data this way. Also for not tech savvy users, folders have the nice interaction pattern of question-response via menu selection. Th…

From my minor tech support experience, users don't understand what they've saved a file as. Search is great but if you don't know what the needle is it gets hard.
Post reply on HN