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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

eleanorkonik.com

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Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#91

Post by BlueTemplar »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Spatial metaphors is arguably the easiest shortcut to a design that makes sense to humans. Spatial reasoning is something even animals are capable of. Categories are much more abstract, and while useful, less intuitive. Which is why folders should remain, complement them with other means of navigation for sure, but hiding them away will only make things less intuitive. In the end, whatever capabilities your design ha…

Indeed, consider how one navigates a "memory palace" going into a specific room (=folder) !

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#92

Post by pphysch »

culi wrote: post #80
pphysch wrote: post #60

Trees/hierarchies ("folders") are for organization, unconstrained graphs/networks ("tags") are for ontologies. Crossing these streams leads to a lot of trouble. When flexible graphs/networks are abused for organizational purposes, you get circular dependencies, spaghetti code, and general dysfunction. Organizations (code or people) need to be easy to navigate. When rigid hierarchies are abused for classification purp…

You could hypothetically collapse the two though. You can have tags and could use those to automatically generate efficient organization structures. For example, say you have the following datums with the following tags apple: plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit peach: plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit rose: plant, Rosaceae, shrub, flower dandelion: plant, Asteraceae, herb, flower carrot: plant, Apiaceae, herb, root pig: animal,…

I like this approach: building a simple folder interface on top of a more flexible tag system, which can always be accessed when necessary. I think many systems would benefit from it.

There are tradeoffs, though: a fair bit of overhead for each heavily nested item. And you would want some support for ensuring the integrity of the hierarchies (i.e. someone accidentally removes "tree" from the tag set of "apple").

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#93

Post by EleanorKonik »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #32
EleanorKonik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god I'm sorry I wasn't expecting this level of traffic, let me see if I can fix it.

Don't worry about it, it's the HN effect. I really recommend using a PaaS like Netlify (I'm not sponsored or affiliated). It will take a weight off your shoulders the next time you get a surge.

I think I managed to get Cloudflare set up, let's hope that works

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#94

Post by snowwrestler »

fishtacos wrote: post #45
asciimov wrote: post #31

I still want a filesystem that can do both. I want to have regular folders, and then folders that I can issue a SQL style query to generate their contents. Take multimedia. With a traditional file system you can only have one type of sort. Typically by type (audio, video, image) and then alphabetically. It would often be nice to have a folder that is formed by querying the metadata, say all the items released in the…

MS tried it [0] and failed. It was not easy. This was in the days of Whistler, Blackcomb and Longhorn and always an interesting read if you've the time. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS [1] https://hal2020.com/2013/03/10/winfs-integratedunified-stora...

Apple did it and succeeded? In MacOS you can use tags and/or folders to organize files, and there is an OS-wide search index (Spotlight).

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#96

Post by ASalazarMX »

politician wrote: post #65
ASalazarMX wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, folders are tags.

In the sense that a staircase can be used to seat guests. Folders are not like tags, tags are like flat folders. Folders are better at separating, tags are better at mixing.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#98

Post by munificent »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #15
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #8

After 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.

> if tags can imitate them, they can't replace their structure.

Technically, they can. A "folder" is just a tag whose name is the entire directory path up to root. All files with that same tag are in the same folder.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#99

Post by fouc »

mro_name wrote: post #76
fouc wrote: post #64

It should be possible to mimic tags with folders & clever scripting that moves files around according to their "tags". Imagine a command like: tagmv file1 file2 directory1 directory2 -t tag1 tag2 tag3 where it moves the files/directories to something like ~/t/tag1#/tag2#/tag3#/ Or instead of using "#" could use some other special/rare character/unicode to indicate that it is a "tag-directory". The hierarchy of the ta…

There's a talk about such https://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/ , there's a video. Karl seems to have a fancy TUI, I made me a cmdline helper https://codeberg.org/mro/Tagger .

I've seen that type of idea before, encoding tags within the file name. But as someone that lives in the terminal, I'm not a huge fan of cluttering up and making the file names so long.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#100

Post by daenz »

stickfigure wrote: post #86

I've always wanted to see a "folder view" of a purely tags-based system. At the root level, `ls` shows you a list of tags (and possibly "all files"). cd into a tag, and `ls` shows you a list of the remaining tags (and relevant files). Repeat as many times as you like. Example session might look something like this: / $ ls -d foo bar baz / $ cd foo /foo $ ls -d bar baz /foo $ cd baz /foo/baz $ ls -d bar Obviously, at…

I'm really trying not to overly promote Supertag[0] in this thread (disclaimer: I am the author) , but it does exactly what you describe.

0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/

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