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Comment by amenghra | Hacker News Reader

  - bunch of random files in ~/Desktop/
  - more random files in ~/Desktop/old/
  - more more random files in ~/Desktop/old/old/...
  - real stuff in ~/dev and ~/Site/
  - a mix of important and unimportant files in ~/Downloads/

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- Desktop has the same fate this ^. Have a CLI tool that takes everything from the desktop and puts it in ~/Desktop/cleaned/

- ~tools/dotfiles/ hosts all dotfiles with a Makefile that sets everything up

- ~tools/<randomTools> - contains mostly useful utilities and scripts like fonts, vpn configs, terminal color schemes, config patches to apply to `/etc/` after fresh install etc.

- ~Projects/<client|company>/<project_name> for paid work projects

- ~Projects/<projectName> for personal projects

- ~Playground/<experiment> for experiments, prototypes or building software from github out of curiosity

- ~Applications/<appName> for apps I build from source and copy/link binaries to `~/bin`. I'm on Linux so this is non-standard.

- ~GoogleDrive/<accountName> for Google drive sync with Insync

- ~Vaults/<vaultName> for mounting cryfs encrypted directories from the Google Drive directories. (some times use plasma vault for this)

+1 for Playground/ I was just trying to decide where to put some experiments I was working on and Tests/ just didn't look right :-)

I put 'em in ~/rad Research and Development

I called my version of this ~/sandbox.

same here

Yeah I like this too. Perhaps I use playground/ for when I am in a good mood and sandbox/ when in a bad mood.

playground/ when you expect things to be clean

sandbox/ when you're ready to get messy

+2 Yeah that is so much better.

To be consistent, I treat myself as a client and follow all the same rules. But I also give the important ones their own "brand" name. It's a pseudo "exit" plan. That is, I could "sell" to someone else.

The gist is, doing my own projects differently took away more then it helped.

One thing I really liked in the old MacOS was that the Desktop wasn't really a location for files, it was just a place where you could move them to keep them handy to work on, and then use the "put away" command to send them back to wherever they came from. (They really needed some session management for different kinds of tasks, though.

I'm in a similar boat, and I'll mention one "weird trick" that has helped me.

What used to happen was I'd download, say, an Ubuntu image, use it, and then say "... I might need this again" and leave it there. Then a week goes by, I've forgotten its there. Sorting by Date Added its now piled under 10 other items. The empire of dirt grows...

The trick? A Trash that automatically empties items older than 30 days. MacOS has this, at least. (Note, this is a rolling empty; not an "empty everything every month" kind of deal). Now I just delete those "I might need this..." files. I know I can grab it from the Trash if I need it again, which I've done a few times. Most of the time, I didn't need it, and so it gets thrown out as it should.

The effect is two fold. Obviously there's less junk in ~/Downloads in general. But that has the knock-on effect that it is now less daunting to go through and sweep up ~/Downloads.

Empirically, my ~/Downloads, ~/old.Downloads, etc. used to be filled with easily 400 files and folders each. Now? My current ~/Downloads is at 76 items after two years. And that's currently at my peak; I'm about to go through and clear out about 20 of those things. Which is easy to do, compared to trying to face a mound of 400 files with names like "TEST.txt"...

This is similar to /tmp/ on Linux (well, Debian at least). On each reboot it gets emptied which means I put there everything that I will probably not use after this session. Suspend / wake cycle doesn't empty /tmp/ directory, but just knowing it will get emptied sooner or later is enough.

I use Classifier to manage file in my Ubuntu Downloads directory; it moves files into subdirectories by extension. I run it daily from cron, and my backup script runs it before backing up.

https://github.com/bhrigu123/classifier

Win10 makes it easy to automatically empty the Recycle Bin and Downloads (but sadly, not other locations). One major PITA is that Firefox does not use the standard Downloads folder/directory, but has its own. It's configurable, of course, but I never remember until I've already got a zillion things in it, and I try to run everything with a minimum of customization.

Firefox defaults to remembering where you last downloaded a file for each site. This is useful for things like image sharing sites when you always want to drop pictures into your pictures folder, but you can disable it and always use the default downloads folder.

In about:config, set 'browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite' to false (you may have to create the preference), set 'browser.download.useDownloadDir' to true, and set 'browser.download.lastDir' to your preferred location.

More info - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/887248

You forgot the "old desktop (2013)" naming structure.

But yeah, that's exactly me.

Lucky you, I have nested subfolders with roughly the same folder structure within the old desktop from my even older desktops.

I never thought another human being exists who does this exactly. I bet there are millions of us!

I have a z.old with various folders in it

  - z.old/macbook.2016
  - z.old/macbook.2013
  - z.old/thinkpad.2011
  - z.old/downloads.201705
  - z.old/downloads.201701
  - z.old/desktop.2014
  - z.old/SERVERNAME.2018

going back to around 2002, I could probably delete the entire thing and not miss a thing heh

Mine's even uglier: Since disk storage grows much faster than my use of it, the last thing I do as I move to a new computer is to copy its entire hard disk to ~/archive/MachineName. (I do delete swap files since they're large on the newer images.) I (almost) never lose anything, but it's a bear to find things, and do I really need all those Windows files? On the other hand, I can easily recreate the entire working environment, OS, apps, and all this way, and that's saved my butt now a couple of times.

Fortunately, Win10 makes it easy to delete Recycle Bin and Downloads after N days, so at least some things are self-cleaning...

Desktop is the dumping ground for screenshots for me. I take a lot of screenshots at work which get pasted into things like JIRA tickets, slack etc

These end up accumulating on my desktop over the years until I can be bothered to delete them

This used to be me until I started using screenshot shortcuts that put images in the clipboard instead of files. You can paste directly into jira, slack, hangouts, whatsapp web, and many other places.

Screenshots are a big part of my workflow too, and this made things feel a lot cleaner for me. This will automatically put all your screenshots into a specific folder (assuming you're on OSX).

    mkdir ~/Pictures/Screenshots
    defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots

Doing exactly this but from time to time I move my old desktop folders in a backup folder with a date. But now I have so many in there with duplicate files. I'm sure I'd win a lot of disk space by merging/deduping those folders.

This is my problem right now. I'm trying to clean this all up and, while there's tools to find dupes, they're still cumbersome.

I need a tool that will look for duplicate directory structures.

This is sadly so true of my own orginzation.

My only addition would be

- random documents of dubious value in “my documents”

This...

https://xkcd.com/1360/

I once found some x86 assembly code I'd written decades ago and buried real deep (the folder names were in ALLCAPS and no more than 8 characters.

Pretty much what the xkcd says. I basically never delete files, they just get moved to deeper layers as time goes by. I roughly know where to find my elementary school presentations, first websites, university assignments and emails, rotated irclogs.. The mental map will take me there if curiosity awakens, better not to mess it up by organising.

Withought Spotlight I‘d be lost

Hey, it's exactly like me

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