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

tmsu.org

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

#91

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mywittyname wrote: post #78

The reason hierarchical structures are used in file systems is because they are a pretty intuitive and, most importantly, generic way of classifying and storing information. For the most part, just about any file you have on your computer can be stuffed into some sort of folder structure. Specialized files like music, movies and images are a solved problem. iTunes and other software do a great job at organizing this…

I don't think its intuitive at all. We don't ask questions like "What parent folder did I put that document it?" We ask "Where is that document I printed yesterday. The one that I got via email."

With liberal use of tags, and the ability to browse them fluidly, we could ask those sort of questions.

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

#92

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

Not convinced. Why wouldn't a 'tag browser' work just like that too? Even better, since what I'm clicking on are meaningful tags, instead of 'directory names'

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

#94

Post by JadeNB »

vlunkr wrote: post #28
kpil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it. Recently I've been cleaning up my music library and I'm seeing some of the shortcomings of the current system. What do you do with a compilation album? Have a folder for each artist or put them all together, (Which would separate them from others works by the same artist)? iTunes or wh…

> You have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it.

I think that this is extremely important. You mention iTunes, which does its best to pretend that there's no hierarchical file system underlying it. There is, of course, but—ugh, one look at it will make you long for a totally flat file structure.

I think that it's important that any hierarchical-file-system 'killer' actually not replace (or render meaningless), but only supplement, the often-useful hierarchical structure; and it looks like this tool does that.

(In case that looks like an argument, let me say explicitly that I am agreeing with you.)

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

#95

Post by JadeNB »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #39

Stuff like this is cool, but it really points out just how poor the filesystem is for organizing certain types of data. The "Why does TMSU not detect file moves and renames?" question in the FAQ really highlights how this isn't helped along by the filesystem at all. One comment mentioned BFS, which had some really cool stuff. There's an Ars Technica article that touches on some of it[0]. The secret to BFS, in my mind…

> Unless the metadata becomes a first class citizen in the filesystem, any attempts to layer it on top will have problems.

Remember when it seemed like Mac OS might give us a modern era of rampant metadata (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2005/04/macosx-10-4/6)? Ah, those were the days.

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

#96

Post by e12e »

zaphar wrote: post #87
tremon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of semantic search itself, nor do I enjoy meticulously tagging my files. But I would love to have different views of my files, based on different metadata. I know that I'm not always searching for files along the same hierarchy: sometimes I want to search along a timeline, because I know that I edited two files around the same time. Or I remember where I was when I wrote something, and I'd like to s…

I don't really need semantic search. Full text search covers 99.9% of my needs.

Your videos, music and pictures must be rather boring, if you can index them with OCR... ;-)

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

#97

Post by therein »

blakeyrat wrote: post #62
kpil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did Mac Classic make use of that?

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

#98

Post by solipsism »

igravious wrote: post #82
tremon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to be of (some) help :) I'm not a developmental psychologist btw, just have an interest in cognitive development. The proof you're looking for would be more the field of cognitive neuroscience. There definitely are graph-like connections between concepts all over the brain, I didn't mean to suggest that our brains work hierarchical only, to the exclusion of all other relations. As an example: if our brains were…

I wonder about this a lot. File systems are arranged hierarchically. Fluke of development? Library catalogues are organised hierarchically. Lucky coincidence? Books themselves are laid out hierarchically. I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light? Seems like we like to chunk and splay amorphous informational units into graph-like rooted structures. Maybe cuz of its flexibility? For something we use all…

We have all sorts of associations -- our brain is fundamentally an association engine. One kind of association is simplification/abstraction. This perhaps proves to be one of the most useful kinds of associations, because it helps us make decisions quickly without sifting through massive amounts of data.

I'd say it's fundamental, not any kind of mystery.

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

#99

Post by marcosdumay »

rincebrain wrote: post #29
swalsh wrote: post #25

I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql like file system (i suppose similar to this). It however had issues, and a decision to scrap it delayed the vista project, and reduced the scope of "cool" things it was supposed to deliver.

The thing you're thinking of was indeed supposed to be in Vista, then post-Vista, and then scrapped all together - WinFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

It was promised for Cairo (that become win95), under the name of Object File System.

Different name, exact same promises.

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

#100

Post by jprzybyl »

I can't believe this, but I created something like this in an ad-hoc way. I have a large amount of music, and I needed to be able to transfer them to devices (my phone) based on some sort of tag - I need work-out music, I need driving music, etc. Genres are inappropriate for this. The easiest way to transfer this to the device is have a directory full of links that point to the right files / directories.

So, depending on the need, I will either have two directories (files and tags) or a number of file directories and a tag directory. File directories can have whatever they want, and tag directories have either only tag directories (like workout, driving, etc) or soft links.

Tagging a file / directory is easy - just link to it. Untagging is just as easy. The links don't take up much space, especially next to the music. When I'm transferring the files, I either use a script to make a directory with the links replaced with their file counterparts, or I transfer with something like rsync that can do that itself.

I'm amazed how similar this project is to my own solution. It's nice to have a dedicated script for the whole thing, but the solution itself is very simple, and easy to script with.

This isn't born out of frustration - hierarchical filesystems are perfectly adequate for most tasks. But they have not been trees for a long time - we have links, which let us make any graph we want out of those trees.

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