Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

Someone reached out and said I can use Cloudflare to fix this, so I'm gonna go try that, doot doot.

Let's say I'm recording events for my future travels. trips/paris.md and trips/cancun.md are in my folder structure with them tagged as business and vacation respectively. Later, I can go back and add a "mistakes" tag to cancun.md, but really if ever need to look up all my trips, I know it will be in trips and it's incontrovertible fact that cancun was a trip.

There's room for both, but tagging historically came out of a need where search functions were poor. These days tagging is unnecessary work imo.

First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them! It's not something you can just do once either, because every time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of tags as well. I wound up with many articles whose tags no longer (or never did) match the content.

To get myself out of the tag-curating business, I then tried the "folder" idea by separating areas of concerns into namespaces. So, all of the Python-related notes go under the "Python" namespace. All of the database notes into "Databases," and so on. All the did was shift the problem space. Which namespace does the note on SQLAlchemy go in? If an article does not fit into an existing namespace, should I create one for it now, or put it in the root and hope I remember to move it if a second related note comes along? To put it succinctly, my notes do not fit into a DAG.

My third iteration dropped both tags and namespaces and implemented the FTS5 search built into SQLite. Two years later, I have no regrets. The only "curation" I have to worry about is giving each note an accurate title and breaking up large notes into smaller ones when it makes sense. Now when I need something I just search for it and it shows up in the results.

Google for all of their other faults got one thing extremely right when it came to web content and email: curation is a fine hobby but for Really Getting Shit Done, you index the content well and then just search for it when you need it.

File systems can technically break all of these; files can contain multiple files within themselves with many file systems, the ability to have multiple paths leading to the same file means that if you just have the file in hand you don't have a unique path, which also means that if you remove that name it doesn't mean you've removed the file. But most of the time, you can kinda get away with writing normal code and it'll do the right thing. But that last one really burns. It is really easy to write code assuming file systems are just trees, and in particular can't have infinite loops, and be wrong about that.