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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”

#141

Post by nexuist »

snowwrestler wrote: post #94
fishtacos wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

WinFS was meant to be far more sophisticated than that. It's more like Salesforce for your file system.

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

#142

Post by PeterisP »

I strongly disagree with the article's assertion "take my word for it — it’s much easier to tell a computer “do this to every file in this folder” than to tell it “first, find everything with this tag, then put those into a string, then do a thing to every file in this string…”" because in most reasonable filesystem API's that's exactly what you would do with folders - first, find everything matching this wildcard from this folder string, put these filenames in a list, and then do a thing do every file in this list... I don't see a fundamental difference, in both cases you're running an arbitrary query first to get a list of the file names or handles with a specific criteria.

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

#143

Post by mason55 »

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…

This is how I tell people to use Confluence. There’s no hope of ever having the general set of all articles organized in a way that makes sense so just try to make the article searchable. If it’s about an error, make sure the error message is in there. If it’s about configuration of a feature make sure the feature name and “configuration” is in the title. Also make sure to write a paragraph describing what the article is about and different times someone might need it.

It’s like internal white hat SEO

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

#144

Post by civilized »

daenz wrote: post #36
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.

I wrote Supertag[0] specifically to get the same kind of ergonomics with tags as you get with folders. Basically you can dynamically render sub-folders based on the tags that apply to your current selection. Example: /A/B contains the intersection of tags A and B. If sub-folder C exists underneath /A/B, it's because one of the files in the intersection also has tag C. 0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/

Oh, this is neat. The user is constructing a predicate "A and B and C and ...", where each new "and" is added by clicking into a folder.

If you add OR with ctrl+click, and perhaps some sort of NOT, the user can now construct arbitrary predicates using only the tags and familiar folder point-and-click operations.

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

#145

Post by guelo »

akvadrako wrote: post #125
iqanq wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

select * from notes where upper(text) like '%SQLITE%' :P

My point is "sqlite" is effectively a tag.

Right. If you search for "database" instead of sqlite it will only show up if you happened to use that word in the notes. If you're searching notes from years ago you might not remember the exact keyword you need. You need a search engine with a powerful enough synonym/grammatical similarity capability.

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

#146

Post by lamontcg »

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…

> 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?

You don't need to have a perfect heirarchy, you just need to have a heirarchy that you'll remember.

If you constrain yourself into trying to produce a Liskov free heirarchy you'll tie yourself in knots.

I'd probably put SQLAlchemy under Python because it is python-specific. Databases should be kept for your notes on PostgreSQL administration (and you may have python scripts in there but they'll be to serve the purpose of administrating a concrete PostgreSQL install or something.

And you don't need to find all the database stuff and collect it together, you just need to know where you put something. So largely put it in the folder that makes the most immediate sense to you and don't overthink it. Later if you hate it, refactor it. But remember that you're dealing with your own personal hash table for retrieval and not trying to implement group_by. The latter issue is where you'd need an index over your notes that was searchable, but I don't find myself needing it.

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

#147

Post by foxfluff »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #137
foxfluff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compu…

Yeah these hierarchies are something that really slow me down. Was it arch/aarch64/dts? Arrgh no, arch/aarch64/boot/dts? No, actually arch/arm64/boot/dts..

Similarly, I couldn't decide on a hierarchy for my apartment. What's above living room? If root is your entire house, does that mean you can skip into any room without going through another? I can't go to the bedroom at the other end of my apartment without going through corridor..ish thing and the living room. I can't place room above the other because none contain the other. So I guess root is the whole house then. What does cd .. in my bedroom do? Do I get out of the apartment, so that I can enter another room? That's just weird. But ok, I'll take it: I can magically teleport out of my room and "into the apartment" and just warp into another room. Convenient, could we also flatten the bookshelf and bottom shelf into my apartment so that I can warp straight to them without first thinking about "livingroom"? Hierarchy begone :)

And still there is no spatial relationship between items under livingroom. It's unorganized chaos. I have more than one bookshelf.. I can refer to the bookshelf on the left or bookshelf on the right but in a folder? It gets interesting when you try to draw the line between living room and kitchen since they're kinda one and the same but not really. They're spatially separated but it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

On a map, where I can see continents, countries, cities, all at one glance. What shallow hierarchy there is, you can also see right through it; it's merely a guideline, not an obligation. You can see through multiple layers of hierarchy and your vision is not restricted to one branch. I can slide from Finland to Sweden near Tornio without having to first back up in some artificial hierarchy. I could do that even if Finland and Sweden were considered to be on different continents for some weird reason.

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

#148

Post by jahewson »

tylerhou wrote: post #120
BoppreH wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Technically, if their notes can't be represented by a DAG, they also can't be represented by a tree either.

Right but the point is that the notes, as described, can actually be represented by a DAG. They just can’t be represented by a tree.

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

#149

Post by Nition »

My personal hot take:

Folders are just heirarchical tags.

Tags are just non-heirarchical folders.

Both can be compared to programming classes, with subclassing representing folders (key negative: Can't inherit from multiple parents), and class composition representing tags (key negative: No heirarchy).

Folder names (including parent folders) could automatically be applied as tags. Tags could likewise be viewed as folders (tags with multiple "parents" would be something like symlinks), but would need a heirarchy to become nested.

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

#150

Post by fouc »

alpaca128 wrote: post #124
fouc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also this limits the number of tags that can be assigned to a file, with the limit varying between operating systems. But if you don't use filenames you have to store this tagging information externally, which has to stay in sync with file locations and ideally not be reliant on one specific program. There's folders + symlinks but I imagine that might be complicated to manage as well.

I think it's possible to avoid using symlinks and just use plain folders to represent tags only. By using a special naming strategy on the folders themselves, it would be possible to have a set of scripts for "tagging" files and operating on them. Tagging would be equivalent to just moving the files into the relevant nested tag directories.

No duplicate files or symlinks necessary.. Can make scripts like tagcd and tagls to make it work.

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