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

While I tried DEVONthink and have even written a personal document management system myself in the past, I have come to realise that no proprietary system will last forever. So I went back to files, folders, naming conventions and a good search tool + Finder replacement.

As to the conventions:

* I follow the recommendations of a German Professor named Loehn [1]. Prof. Loehn recommends to name every file with three parts and add a datestamp to the file. For example: "Programming_Node_Async-2019-03-07", a three-part taxonomy, going from more general to more detail.

* Every file goes into a folder. Every. So I need to build a good folder system.

* Every folder is in ~/Documents/FOLDERS

As to the tools:

I use Alfred (not for search, but for creating keyboard shortcuts to start my essential tools with a key combination).

Then I use HoudahSpot.app for search. It is a better interface for Spotlight search. It allows me to save searches as templates, see search results in a table, which is super important for me to narrow the results down, exclude folders etc in a very easy way. It is my personal knowledge management tool.

Finally I use "Path Finder" (PF) as a finder replacement. Whenever I am in a folder, I can hit `Shift+Cmd+F`, which will focus on a field that will let me enter keywords. PF will start to filter my folder based on my input. So I can focus on what I need. PF is a gorgeous replacement for the Finder app with many enhancements.

The combination of all this will allow me to find every file, every project, every folder from within the past 15 to 20 years in a split second.

Side note:

1) I don't keep files on the desktop either. Rather I have a temp folder named INBOX on my desktop where everything will be put in to be processed into ~/Documents/FOLDERS/(subfolders), and I have the discipline to empty ~/Desktop/INBOX regularly.

2) My programming projects go into ~/workspace/

[1] inventor of Loehn Method, which is a methodology like "Getting Things Done" (by David Allen)

> I rarely need anything in that folder beyond 10-20 documents like passport or birth certificate scans.

You trust Dropbox with that sort of thing?

I have moved just about everything of note off my Mac and onto Google Drive and Google Team Drive for our org. I then have access to it via Drive Stream and Google Drive search makes it very easy to find what I'm looking for almost instantly.

For active code projects I really only keep /usr/local/src on my local drive. Those are all git repos linked up to GitHub.

No system of organization works for everyone.

    ~/Projects/
        ... bunch of Git and SVN repos ...
    ~/Writings/
        ... Git repo full of text files ...
    ~/Music// /
        Songs grouped by year,
        PCM bounces with name + date
    ~/Pictures// /
        Originals, + edited as copies
    ~/Downloads/
        Articles/
        Documents/
        Software/
        Incoming/
    ~/Misc/$num/
        Unceremoniously dump everything else here

“Clean” is overrated. Storage is cheap. Only clean things as much as it helps you find things. Spotlight is pretty good at finding things. I use tags to label how “good” something is, with red = excellent, orange = good, and yellow = has some value.

All articles are renamed so that the filename is the title of the article.

Desktop is scratch space for anything that I’m working on at this particular moment. If I’m not working on it now, I drop it in ~/Misc/$num++ or delete it. I purge files about once a year just to keep garbage from filling spotlight results, and only secondarily to keep free disk space.

Pros: super easy

Cons: It's a global namespace and easily cluttered, and the clutter is visible as the default background of your display.

It's like "saving things" on my physical desk - a bad habit I tell myself not to do, but still find myself doing. (chucks a few things that have been on my desk).