At ~ (tilde) "root", I have 3 major folders.
- Work - Labs (informal code projects and practice) - Personal
But I keep my files in Google Drive that are in less need of security.
Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
71–80 of 143 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, what kind of documents you keep in there? I have thought about it and even have a scanner but the truth is I don't seem to have anything that's actually worth saving? I have maybe 20 documents that I actually need to keep and at that scale a simple folder full of PDFs works just fine.
Everything. I have databases for home and work. In the home database I have top-level folders for me and my wife (for personal stuff we each might store), documents, invoices and receipts. The Documents folder has all sorts of delineation - banking, animals (pet passports, vaccination history, etc), businesses, insurance, investing, legal, medical, peoperty, radio (N1GMA), taxes, vehicles, vendors, etc. I scan everyt…
I do the same thing, but I just scan with Fujitsu ScanSnap and dump in a huge folder in Dropbox. They're OCR'ed and named with the date by default, and that's enough that I can basically always find what I want.
That said, I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans. To the point where I wonder if the scanning is even worth it. Why don't I just toss all that stuff in a big box (so roughly sorted by time) and go through it in the rare event that I need something someday? I do set aside tax documents when they come, and other "action items", so those are a different case. I'm talking about just the stuff I scan for archival purposes. Seems really unlikely that I actually need that stuff in digital format.
For non-paper stuff, I use Evernote. There again though, I have dozens and dozens of notebooks and stacks of notebooks that hold my thousands of notes and it's getting overwhelming. It's getting to the point where I just use my "recent notes", my 10-20 shortcuts for notes I use all the time, and search for everything else.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#73Having 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,…
Don't save files on the desktop
Why?
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#74Fun tip: Make a folder called “Developer” in ~ Take a look in Finder.
I get a folder named "Developer" with an icon of a folder with a hammer. What do you get?
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#75~/Code/ L python/ L project1/ L ... L dotnet/ L web/ L work/ L ... ~/Documents/ L school/ L Spring2019/ L ... L personal/ L work/ That's about all I really access other than Downloads which is a huge mess that gets purged every so often. Anything of lasting value gets moved out of there asap. ~/Documents/ is backed up to iCloud so I can access them anywhere. (Tip: Any directory you don't want to be backed up can be s…
Incidentally, Go doing that made my first foray into it a very easy "Oh, yeah, this programming language isn't gonna be for me." decision.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#76~/Code/ L python/ L project1/ L ... L dotnet/ L web/ L work/ L ... ~/Documents/ L school/ L Spring2019/ L ... L personal/ L work/ That's about all I really access other than Downloads which is a huge mess that gets purged every so often. Anything of lasting value gets moved out of there asap. ~/Documents/ is backed up to iCloud so I can access them anywhere. (Tip: Any directory you don't want to be backed up can be s…
Incidentally, Go doing that made my first foray into it a very easy "Oh, yeah, this programming language isn't gonna be for me." decision.
Go modules has removed that restriction, although previously you could also get around it by avoiding Go’s build system (e.g. use Bazel instead). Some people would also just stick their go code in /go/src/example.com/pkgname, which is not that different from the way you might structure Java code anyway.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#77I keep everything in the following folder structure.
~/projects//-.
e.g. ~/project/2019/0307-hnpost/
It's simple and has been working very well over the years as you can quite easily find projects based on year and on name. Older projects can be removed / pruned you run out of diskspace. Keeping thing organised is just creating a single folder. I have a ZSH alias called mkproj which quickly creates a new project.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#78For my work laptop, I use a single ~/Workspace directory, with ./GitHub, ./Local, and ./Personal within that.
All of my non-code stuff is in misc. app-specific cloud services: Google Drive for work stuff, Ulysses for personal notes/writing, Things for tasks etc. I also use KeepIt for bookmarks, which I really recommend.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time in my life trying to over-engineer my productivity with new apps, tools, or systems that I never end up using.
Some general tips:
- Don't try to solve problems you don't have yet. - Keep it simple.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#79I add #tags to filenames. This makes them easily portable and searchable everywhere, even when shared over the network.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
#80Labeled folders within labeled folders, accessed through Finder and Terminal