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Xichekolas

An alternative to hierarchical file systems.

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How about a Zork style room-model file system?

You are in Foocorp documents. East is Bloggins&Smith, south is Vexcorp.

You can see Foocorp.xls

Bob is here. Jane is here.

Bob says "Jim, can we go over the numbers for Foo?"

> Use Foocorp.xls with Excel

(Excel starting...)

I've been thinking recently about that too. It's inefficient to use a traditional folder/file system, at least for your personal documents (for system and program files I think they're better off the original way.)

What about folders that represent tags? I could tag a file (say a picture) with Danny (my name), Vacation, and 2007. The system creates 4 "folders" as we understand them, each one labeled with a tag, and the final one labeled as "images" or something similar (whatever the file type is). You could open the "images" folder and see the image, along with all other images. You could drill down further into images>vacation and see all files tagged with both images and vacation. You will also see additional folders for other items that have additional tags and fit in the images>vacation tag.

You could also get to the same file by going into the "Danny" folder, to see all files tagged with "Danny,"

It's a little difficult to explain, and I'm sure that what I'm trying to express is already being developed by someone, but either way, it is a more efficient system than what we already have. No more annoying shortcuts and restrictive folders.

Yeah my thoughts on the matter have always included tagging. It just seems logical to have the same file in more than one group (or folder if you want to call it that), and I hate drilling down seven levels to find something. My problem has always been in dealing with system files. The current setup seems rather logical for them anyway. Maybe a two pronged approach like you suggest makes the most sense.

It seems like that would be pretty straightforward to add to any filesystem that already supports metadata.

I'm sure Windows has something similar, but on MacOS X.5 (a feature borrowed from BeOS, IIRC), you can create a Smart Folder that's basically a canned query for files matching a very large set of criteria. I'm not sure what the API is for extending the criteria, but presumably adding tags wouldn't be all that difficult.

I've considered this idea myself, previously, and I like it a lot. The beauty is that if you go to \Images\Vacation\2005, it's the same as going to \2005\Vacation\Images, so you can access your files in an intuitive way no matter which train of thought got you there.

The only thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to represend these tags as directories. You shouldn't see them all at the top level, that'd be pretty crowded.

I always just thought you'd index the tags and search on them.

What is your opinion (on the concepts) of David Gelenter's Lifestreams project?

http://www.cs.yale.edu/~freeman/lifestreams.html

One can imagine it's Time Machine'sque metaphor being extended to archive your online life (twitter, Facebook) as well (assuming the data could be retrieved)

At my work, some people organize documents on the shared drive by date and others by location of the client. So, if you want to look for the pitch we did for a certain Virginia client in January 2006 you first have to check the /Virginia/ folder and then check the /2006/Jan/ folder. If it's not in either one of those, it may be in /smith/companies/name_of_company/, where "smith" is the name of the guy that originally authored the documents. It's a mess.

Google Docs is organized this way.

Is it really? I thought it was just search for your documents by keywords found in them. There is no way to look at all the tags or navigate through them. That's actually one of my issues with GDocs. You don't have many organizational tools for the documents. They would actually be a good candidate for an overhaul similar to what we're discussing.

Maybe I'm confused, but I think the "folders" in Google Docs behave the way you'd like. I can put a doc in one or more folders, and then I can look at the contents of only one folder. And I can have sub-folders. And really the folders are just tags.

What about this? Put every document in a directory called 'All' or something. Want to tag foo.txt as vacation? 'mkdir vacation && ln All/foo.txt vacation/'

You could do something extremely similar with BFS 10 years ago, and that's the concept behind the long-delayed WinFS.

Indeed. I came up with a new motto lately: "Premature hierarchisation is the root of all rigidity."

One of my many "I'll never have time for that" interests is experimenting with OS-wide transparent persistence.

Microsoft is already working on that. ;)

All the more reason for someone else to work on it, and do it right.

i wouldn't worry about Microsoft actually developing something new and useful. Unless Apple did it first of course.

To be fair, WinFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS) had some really exciting ideas in it. I distinctly remember being a sophomore in college, looking forward to "Longhorn" because of things like WinFS, but having trepidation about it because of things like Palladium. Of course, that was a good six years ago. They ended up gutting both of those features out of Vista to get the OS out the door and even then it was years late. But I digress. :)

Bah, stop pandering to the Microsoft haters.

Actually that's not how I meant it. Regardless of who is working on it, it shouldn't stop you from working on it yourself and doing it better.

And that's why you stuck "do it right" on at the end, eh?

"Do it right" means as opposed to doing something the way a big corporation would do it (generally design by committee or by apathetic drones). MS is certainly guilty of that, but I wasn't picking on them.

It wasn't meant to pander anybody - it was merely stating an opinion...

Ah, good point. On another note, people who vote on HN are the smartest people in the world. That's my opinion.

Apparently the voters disagree.

Maybe they felt pandered-to? ;)

No, no, I'm just expressing an opinion, like mixmax. It's up to the voters whether they actually think they're so smart. For example, here is another opinion: icky is the best handle ever.

Why, thank you! :)

Windows has had the ability to categorize files for awhile. If you look in a file's properties, you can add custom properties to any file. I don't know if there is a way to use these properties in the file system, though.

Why not take over the ReiserFS project? We all know about the difficulties it's leader is having...

Because Reiser is hierarchical, no?

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