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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

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

#101

Post by jeddy3 »

willbudd wrote: post #81
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…

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

I'm having troubles visualising what you mean, without it becoming "just folders".

Can you elaborate?

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

#102

Post by hooande »

hyferg wrote: post #90
wsinks wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seemed interesting, but why do you have to have an account to log in? I was going to try it out, but.. I just hate not being able to try something before giving away my email.

Maybe we can add anon accounts at some point. The main reason right now is to make the feedback process easier since it starts an email chain that we can follow up on. All of the best improvements recently have started with these email chains and follow on conversations.

You'll get more and higher quality feedback from a larger volume of users. And right now you're self selecting for people who are willing to use their email to create an account.

The best way to improve a product is to have a lot of people use it

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

#103

Post by githubalphapapa »

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,…

Here's a library for writing such classification systems in Emacs Lisp: https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el

Especially, see this example: https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el#sporty-understanding-co...

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

#104

Post by Melatonic »

daenz wrote: post #100
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/

Very interesting

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

#105

Post by brazzy »

> Sometimes people will ask me what I do when I have something that could go into multiple places and the answer has always been pretty simple: if something could conceivably fit in two different folders I need to consolidate my folders.

How does that not lead to an end result where you have one folder "everything", and thus no organization at all? There's always edge cases.

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

#106

Post by BoppreH »

bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. 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…

> To put it succinctly, my notes do not fit into a DAG.

I think you mean "tree" or "hierarchy"? A DAG would be a superset of tagging, and could place SQLAlchemy under both Python and Databases, as long as you consider the edges oriented (i.e. there's a parent-child relationship).

Doesn't solve the tag maintenance issue, though.

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

#107

Post by xtracto »

daenz wrote: post #100
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/

In my opinion, any OpenSource application should not be bashed for promoting in threads like these. What will you win? probably more work as more people try your software and raise issues (feature requests or bugs). The fact that it is Libre means that any "self promotion" will not have any monetary gain, so it is fine with me.

Aaaaanyways... SuperTag looks AMAZING. I will give it a try right now and see how it works for me. Thanks a lot for implementing it :)

EDIT: It doesn't want to install for me on OSX :( Oh well, it sounded too good to be true haha.

      ~ brew install amoffat/rnd/supertag

    Running `brew update --preinstall`...
    ==> Tapping amoffat/rnd
    Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/amoffat/homebrew-rnd'...
    remote: Enumerating objects: 24, done.
    remote: Counting objects: 100% (24/24), done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
    remote: Total 24 (delta 4), reused 24 (delta 4), pack-reused 0
    Receiving objects: 100% (24/24), done.
    Resolving deltas: 100% (4/4), done.
    Error: Invalid formula: /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/amoffat/homebrew- rnd/supertag.rb
    supertag: Unsupported special dependency :osxfuse
    Error: Cannot tap amoffat/rnd: invalid syntax in tap!

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

#108

Post by alpaca128 »

willbudd wrote: post #81
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…

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

Maybe something like "hierarchical taxonomy", or just simply class hierarchy? Though I'm not aware of such a term that's explicitly for tags if that's the point.

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

#109

Post by throwaway_Aef8 »

pphysch wrote: post #92
culi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

maybe on top of your idea ensure there's a graph feature like at the top right of https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index

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

#110

Post by em-bee »

bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. 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…

for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging. since i switched from mutt with its folders to sup which uses tags for email, i don't want to look back. first of all, my extensive list of mutt folders was trivially translated to equivalent tags, so i could continue as i was used to. but then, tagging allowed me to create additional tags as i needed them. i didn't tag everything, and sup also indexes all mails and also has search, so in fact i get the advantage of both tags and search (and i can save searches and treat them like virtual tags/folders as well).

well, effectively, tags too, are just a specialized form of searching.

the one thing i don't see is the problem with tags getting out of sync.

yes, it happens. tags do become obsolete, but that is rarely a problem. it just means that i find get more results than i should otherwise. occasionally when i see way to many obsolete tags i go and clean up that particular category of tags. if it is just a few then i ignore them.

and if i look at a tag and i don't find what i need, then i search for it, and add the tag when i find it so that next time i'll find it faster, because with more than 2 million emails in my archive search alone is not good enough.

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