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

Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#21

Post by tmikaeld »

also1001 wrote: post #17
tmikaeld wrote: post #14

Have tried all apps out there, even the "Database" ones - but it's not portable and it's an instant lock-in. Plus most of the Apps bind to folders anyway, so you'll have a lot of "junk" that you have no idea what it is. What I've found to work is this. Main root folders few and named easily. - Customers - Internal - Private - VMs All sub-folders have numbers, so they can always sort by name so they're always in the s…

You could just use four digits, 5001 - Midfile stuff, 7000 - End stuff, 0999 - Fairly upwards stuff. No need to feel so cramped then.

Exactly, but I've used smaller numbers to keep it compressed and i plotted all the folders i need in advance.

Like i wrote, consider your numbers for your needs.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#22

Post by tmikaeld »

bollockitis wrote: post #18
tmikaeld wrote: post #14

Have tried all apps out there, even the "Database" ones - but it's not portable and it's an instant lock-in. Plus most of the Apps bind to folders anyway, so you'll have a lot of "junk" that you have no idea what it is. What I've found to work is this. Main root folders few and named easily. - Customers - Internal - Private - VMs All sub-folders have numbers, so they can always sort by name so they're always in the s…

Out of curiosity, why wouldn’t you want them to sort alphabetically?

Alphabetically sorting it, would make it harder to find and use what you need the most - but by using a numbered structure you can have the most used folders at the top.

Also, I've found that I remember position easier than visually looking it up alphabetically.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#25

Post by wassimdotis »

oskapt wrote: post #9
fredsted wrote: post #6

Having some more context would be nice, but here's some tips as a web developer. * Don't save files on the desktop. * Create a Projects or Dev folder in your home directory and make a folder for each project. (For Web development, I use Laravel Valet which automatically makes a foldername.test vhost inside ~/Dev.) * My Downloads folder is very messy. I could probably set up a job to delete files older than 6 months,…

For managing folders that collect cruft, or for doing things like deleting screenshots from the desktop after some period of time, I use Hazel. It’s great for menial maintenance tasks.

Hazel looks very interesting, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#26

Post by [deleted] »

fredsted wrote: post #6

Having some more context would be nice, but here's some tips as a web developer. * Don't save files on the desktop. * Create a Projects or Dev folder in your home directory and make a folder for each project. (For Web development, I use Laravel Valet which automatically makes a foldername.test vhost inside ~/Dev.) * My Downloads folder is very messy. I could probably set up a job to delete files older than 6 months,…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#28

Post by sixhobbits »

`ag -g `

I don't have a ton of files, but I'm impressed at how quickly silver searcher[0] can find things. `-g` if the filename is specific enough. A bit longer, but not too bad if I need to search by content instead.

[0] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?

#30

Post by princekolt »

I keep all my development projects in ~/Workspace. Everything else goes in either iCloud Documents (if they're important documents) or in ~/Documents if they're not. (I got the 200GB iCloud subscription btw).

I use ~/Desktop strictly for transient files, which I delete frequently. I still let Time Machine back it up, though, in case I accidentally delete something I meant to save. Time Machine has saved my life from accidental deletes more often than I can recall.

Thinking about it, my local storage is quite lean. Ever since I started using iCloud for photos and documents, my local storage has only been used for git repos (and apps, of course).

Post reply on HN