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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”

#131

Post by daenz »

xtracto wrote: post #107
daenz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Osxfuse is notoriously problematic software. Would you mind opening an issue on the supertag project please?

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

#133

Post by fleddr »

This problem is pretty much solved by Adobe Lightroom, although not at filesystem level, purely within the application itself. You tag photos with keywords, which can be hierarchical.

Let's say you take a photo of a frog in Florida at night. You apply the keywords "frog, Florida, night".

Over time you photograph all kinds of other creatures as well as across several locations, so this list of individual keywords will grow. The cool thing is that you can now group the keywords themselves.

You create a new keyword "USA", and then drag "Florida" in it. You create a new keyword "Amphibians" and drag "Frogs" in it. And then create "Animals" and drag "Amphibians" in it.

The powerful thing is that you now have the power of flat keywords as well as hierarchical browsing across multiple hierarchies.

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

#134

Post by fastball »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

With 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…

Yep, that's why when we built our PKM app[1], we decided to eschew folders not in favor of tags but in favor of nesting the notes (which we call cards) themselves. From there a card can be nested inside multiple other cards, which is an idea we stole from symlinks, which generally gives the benefit of a structured hierarchy while also giving the flexibility of tags. That being said there are also tags for those who like a flatter structure.

[1] https://supernotes.app

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

#135

Post by psadauskas »

em-bee wrote: post #110
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…

> Everything is a Tag. Users are just Tags with passwords.

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

#136

Post by em-bee »

Quekid5 wrote: post #114
em-bee wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> for me, folders are just a limited form of tagging. I understand that this is a very subjective thing... but folders offer an exclusion which isn't immediately available via tagging. Tagging is implicitly an OR operation. Now, your search engine might offer ways to add "not X", but it's a tradeoff. It you have highly-compartmentalized bits of info you end up with the problem of "how much do have to explicitly exclu…

not sure i follow. can you give an example how exclusion works? all i see is that without using symlinks i can have only one folder/tag per item. i can choose to do that with tags too if i want, but i don't see how using folders helps with that other than forcing me to do it.

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

#137

Post by marginalia_nu »

foxfluff wrote: post #129
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…

I don't consider folders spatial. At all. The only hard relation is hierarchical, and in a folder, there's no inherent order or spatial relationship. I find it a pain to navigate. Actual spatial arrangement of data (and code) is something I've wanted to try for a long time now though. It's incredibly how you can take a map that shows the entire planet, and in a few seconds zoom in to the building you're in. And in a…

It is a bit like the original Myst, which was made of a bunch of "places" that you could walk between along pre-defined paths.

But that's also how we conceptualize space. One place is my bedroom, it connects to a space that's a corridor, which connects to a few spaces like the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. In one of these spaces is a bookshelf, which contains a shelf for sci-fi, a few shelves worth of computer science and physics, then a few shelves of philosophy.

I don't know the Cartesian coordinates of the particular books, but I know if I want to get a book, I walk the path connecting the bedroom, to the corridor, to the living room, and then look in the bookshelf. Then if I want to say read Dune, I know it's in the bottom-most shelf where I keep the sci-fi.

That procedure conceptually translates to

  $ cd ..
  $ cd livingroom
  $ cd bookshelf
  $ cd bottom-shelf
  $ cat Dune

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

#138

Post by stickfigure »

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/

Wow, I did not expect that! Fantastic, I'll check this out when I get a few spare cycles.

EDIT: Couldn't wait. This is an exceptionally well put-together FAQ, explaining the design constraints: https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/faq.html

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

#139

Post by bo1024 »

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").

I implemented this for my email. Each email can have any number of tags. Each tag can have a directory hierarchy.

So for instance an email can be tagged fun/ski, social/facebook/marketplace, money/receipts.

If you open the social/facebook/marketplace “folder” you’ll see the email, but also if you open the money/receipts “folder”. You could also see it in the intersection of the social tag and the fun/ski tag, etc.

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

#140

Post by hocker_news »

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/

This looks great! Am I understanding correctly that all tagged files need to have a unique filename to be addressable?
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