Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#131

Post by leemailll » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

you can try maid (https://github.com/benjaminoakes/maid), or hazel on Mac, but I am not sure whether they can do this automatically. I think your question essentially is a set of boolean expressions and a last-chance rescue check, bash scripts should work

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#132

Post by wtmt » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #90

w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #88

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for: An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion. Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'. The idea would be to optimize set…

One of the biggest regressions in modern browsers is how they all automatically download to the Downloads folder. I really miss the dialogue you used to get where you’d get asked where you’d want to save the file (im aware you still get that if you right click and go “save as” but that’s not always possible with some sites).

As others have said, this can be configured in all popular browsers to ask for the download location. Also, if you use macOS, there’s a paid application called Default Folder X [1] that allows you to set default folders for different applications and dialogs (open/save) and also has shortcuts to get to different folders.

[1]: https://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#133

Post by zaphar » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

jason_slack wrote: post #73

owaislone wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Desktop has the same fate this ^. Have a CLI tool that takes everything from the desktop and puts it in ~/Desktop/cleaned/ - ~tools/dotfiles/ hosts all dotfiles with a Makefile that sets everything up - ~tools/ - contains mostly useful utilities and scripts like fonts, vpn configs, terminal color schemes, config patches to apply to `/etc/` after fresh install etc. - ~Projects/ / for paid work projects - ~Projects/…

+1 for Playground/ I was just trying to decide where to put some experiments I was working on and Tests/ just didn't look right :-)

I called my version of this ~/sandbox.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#134

Post by qqn » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

jamesholden wrote: post #58

aasasd wrote: post #53

For PDFs, references and notes I highly recommend using an app that can assign tags―several for an item, of course. Preferably, tags themselves should be organizeable at least in a hierarchy. You won't create a good collection of tags right away, but you'll grow and groom it over time. It's important to assign tags to new items as soon as they come in. Gradually, you'll learn what words you actually use when you're l…

I know it's kinda pricey, and not everyone can afford it. But if you can, Evernote is actually pretty great for PDFs and tags, etc. I didn't 'get' it for the longest time. But I moved from one country to another, and I didn't want to bring all my paperwork around with me. So I bought a scanner which can scan duplex (both sides), and a red stamp which says 'Scanned'. I digitized everything except super important thing…

And for Android users, CamScanner is a great scanning app. It turns quick cellphone photos into great, clean, auto-cropped scans that it can then bundle into PDF batches (great for grouping receipts by month, for example). The free version does watermark these files (small text on the bottom right of each page), but it's a great app otherwise. I've even used it to scan family photos from distant relatives while traveling and it's worked great (no watermarks on photos, just on the PDFs it renders as far as I can tell).

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#135

Post by zaphar » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

* ~/dotfiles has all my dotfiles version controlled with a shell script to set it all up

* ~/sandbox/ has various experiments and stuff that I'm not sure has a lifespan.

* ~/lib/ has most of my more serious projects. since I often need to add that to some sort of path variable.

* ~/DropBox/ has most of my essay writing and non code artifacts organized somewhat randomly if I'm honest.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#136

Post by zaphar » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #135

* ~/dotfiles has all my dotfiles version controlled with a shell script to set it all up * ~/sandbox/ has various experiments and stuff that I'm not sure has a lifespan. * ~/lib/ has most of my more serious projects. since I often need to add that to some sort of path variable. * ~/DropBox/ has most of my essay writing and non code artifacts organized somewhat randomly if I'm honest.

I do run a custom full text indexer on it all so I can search it. Which helps me find stuff when I need it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#137

Post by Moyamo » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

- ~/docsync: Files I edit on a daily basis and is synchronized with Syncthing to all my devices. I put all projects I'm currently working on in the top-level of this folder except for the categories below. Archived projects are zipped and then put in ~/docsync/old

Categories:

- ~/docsync/accounts: Accounting stuff

- ~/docsync/audiobooks

- ~/docsync/books: All my PDF books

- ~/docsync/dotfiles: git controlled dotfiles.

- ~/docsync/Pictures

- ~/docsync/Music: Lossy compressed music.

Other folders in home directory

- ~/hq-media: Mostly FLAC audio

- ~/git: Clones of other people's git repos

- ~/srv: File shares other than docsync.

- ~/Mail: offline copies of email

- ~/tmp: temporary stuff I'll probably don't want to keep.

- ~/Downloads: Random stuff I've downloaded

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#138

Post by callahanrts » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

- ~/Desktop/ Contains mostly screenshots. I use `defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false` to hide all the icons

- ~/Documents/ is where stuff goes before it gets organized

- ~/Documents// is where things go when there are enough of them to form a group

- ~/Documents/projects// is where I clone projects from github or create my own. Occasionally I clear out projects I haven't touched in a while.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#139

Post by qwerty456127 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

All the code is in the ~/Projects/subfolders. Everything else is in ~/Downloads. Every once in a while the whole ~/Downloads content gets moved to ~/Downloads/old/001, 002, ... etc (thousands already), once the space runs out I move these to an external hard drive. I actually dream of something like what WinFS was supposed to be where there would be no folders/locations but only meaningful metadata you can find files by.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

#140

Post by nohope » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

Few people here have referred to the /tmp directory. This is essential in my workflow. I put a lot of things there (this is also my Downloads folder) and when the computer reboots, its clean again!

One of the computers I use stay turned on for long times, so I have /tmp/t and a cronjob that cleans all files older than 1 day in this directory:

    # Remove all files in /tmp/t older than 1440 min (one day)
    */10 * * * * find /tmp/t -cmin +1440 -delete > /tmp/.find-delete-1440.log 2>&1

Besides that, I have a lot of bunches in $HOME. dot.files, dot.vim, dot.mutt, etc., are all in private git repositories and I have a "~/s" directory I keep synchronized among different machines with rsync (I don't trust Google nor Dropbox). I was thinking about starting using Syncthing [1], though.

[1] https://syncthing.net/