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TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

tmsu.org

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Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#12
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to check out the repair command. It seems to show that TMSU keeps track of file locations on disk. If you move a file, it can find it if it hasn't been modified. If you move and modify a file, it can't find it and will mark it missing. https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/blob/master/src/tmsu/cli/repa...

I wonder why he doesn't use EA's where available (or does he?)

What is EA?

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#13
post #9

I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files. Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this…

I tag all of my Firefox bookmarks. I've been meaning to export them out of Firefox and use some other kind of bookmark manager or write my own (perhaps integrating it in to Emacs).

Something like this might help, if I make each bookmark in to a separate file.

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#14
post #9

I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files. Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this…

I tag all of my Firefox bookmarks. I've been meaning to export them out of Firefox and use some other kind of bookmark manager or write my own (perhaps integrating it in to Emacs). Something like this might help, if I make each bookmark in to a separate file.

You might like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBEL

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#15
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why he doesn't use EA's where available (or does he?)

What is EA?

Probably Extended Attributes (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes)

They stick better with files, as long as your tools know about them and handle them fine. Weakness is that they can (will) get lost in tools that do not. There are many of them: zip-unzip, tar-untar, http requests, ftp, etc.

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#17
post #9

I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files. Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this…

For similar reasons, I just can't bring myself to use OSX's tagging feature; it just seems like so much effort without a good use case. I'm not sure it helps that the defaults are simply colours, rather than real examples. And I don't really want to think about how files are shared (server, dropbox, google drive, usb stick) and do all the necessary research into how tags work in each and every case. I too would be interested to hear if anyone's successfully found an effective use for file-based tagging.

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#18

Tags or folders - Aren't both of them mere kludges that we use when search isn't good enough?

Folders/directories are a necessity as long as we continue to distribute collections of files the way we do. I'm not sure what github would look like in a world without directories, nor how file naming would work. Do you have a proposal for the issues that doing away with directories brings up?

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is EA?

Probably Extended Attributes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes ) They stick better with files, as long as your tools know about them and handle them fine. Weakness is that they can (will) get lost in tools that do not. There are many of them: zip-unzip, tar-untar, http requests, ftp, etc.

Ah. Also, depending on the FS, they are probably too limited, e.g. in size (only 4kb for ext2/3/4).

Re: TMSU is a tool for tagging your files

#20
post #9

I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files. Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in the near future, then this…

For similar reasons, I just can't bring myself to use OSX's tagging feature; it just seems like so much effort without a good use case. I'm not sure it helps that the defaults are simply colours, rather than real examples. And I don't really want to think about how files are shared (server, dropbox, google drive, usb stick) and do all the necessary research into how tags work in each and every case. I too would be in…

I rely heavily on spotlight to find files I want, and about 99% of the time it works perfectly. Sometimes there is a file I am going to keep that I suspect will be hard to track down using spotlight in the future; either because it has to be badly named (source code files), will not be easily indexible (scanned pdfs or images), or my interest in it is not directly connected to the content of the document (i.e. a description of an algorithm with an obscure name which I have a specific application in mind for).

In these cases I use the tags feature to augment the metadata so that I am pretty confident I will be able to find it quickly in future, even if I can't remember exactly what it was or why it was originally saved.

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