why choose?
Current desktop operating systems have hierarchical filesystems and support flat lookup via indexing (e.g. MacOS's spotlight).
Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
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Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#12Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#13>Error establishing a database connection Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.
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Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#14With symlinks (or hard links for that matter) you can have folders work like tags in a real filesystem. That said, binary classification (object A is a member of class B, a function with a boolean truth value) is the basic concept in classification. That is, any classification can be represented correctly with binary classification. There really are a few things where you assign something a category from a finite set…
If only symlinks worked for every software / OS. On Windows at least, there are so many different way to link things (including "subst") that it's hard to get idea which one to use. (I do love symlinks, but having spent most of my time on Windows, there are some edge cases I've hit, for example some third_party software not following the symlink and simply failing to open the file..., and no that was not the old .lnk…
mklink if anyone is curious. It can act oddly in a few cases. Especially if you cross volume/network boundries.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#15After the past 5 years or so of experiencing the supposed best "folderless" computing has to offer on iOS and ideologically similar platforms. I've gained huge respect for how beautiful the concept of the folder is.
Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they can't replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items that naturally fall into several categories, like music or books, but not for general file systems.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#16Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.
If you don't know what's the name of what to search for can you search for it? I get that a lot of developers like the idea of falling back to search because most files you use can be searched for contents but for everyone that has to work with binary files it's not suitable.
Johnny Decimal is also just another abstraction layer and in this a terrible one.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#17Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.
i would still want it to support tagging so that I could ensure that those searches picked up specifically what I wanted and not more random results. I’ve had to try to find things on Confluence and Sharepoint and it takes a lot of time to try to get what you want out of the search results.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#18Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.
A good folder hierarchy is like a library: you know where it is even before you look for it.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#19>Error establishing a database connection Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.
Oh god I'm sorry I wasn't expecting this level of traffic, let me see if I can fix it.
Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
#20Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.
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