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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

I personally never use search tools; at least, not with files I've created myself. IMHO organising correctly your files using aptly named directories and sticking to that is much more effective than dumping stuff around the filesystem and then having to rely on search in order to untangle the mess. That's why I tend to disable desktop icons; in this way I always have to force myself into opening a file manager and actually decide where the files should be put into.

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I'm a data hoarder and I organize meticulously, so I get where you're coming from. But I often need to do searches along different dimensions than the "primary keys" I chose for organizing the directory structure. Search is indispensable for this.

As an example, say I have records related to my taxes - a bunch of documents and images - organized into directories by year, and I want to copy all of the images for the last 5 years out into a temporary directory so that I can flip through them easily. I can browse to my taxes directory, do a search for "kind:picture" then sort the results by modified date and drag the relevant items into the destination directory.

For some types of tasks this is so convenient that sometimes when I'm ssh'd into a server on my home network I'll move files into a mounted network share so that I can manipulate them from Windows Explorer. Clicking around a graphical file explorer is just way less cognitive overhead than stringing together a big command on the command line. Windows Explorer in the Windows 10 era isn't great, but it's much better than e.g. Finder or Thunar, which are my other options on my home computers.

> IMHO organising correctly your files using aptly named directories

I have a lot of ebooks on my computer (> 10000). One problem with organising books and other PDFs is that sometimes they fall into multiple categories. (Should a new scientific article on lucid dreaming go into 'brain and cognitive science' or 'meditation' or 'hypnosis' or 'sleep' or 'self improvement'?) I could dump each new file into the directory representing the first category that comes to mind and make symbolic links from directories referring to other categories, but in the end the number of categories is practically endless. Search is in practice the only workable solution.

Might wanna try calibre.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

My Calibre installation has 10,257 books! That's probably less than half of what's scattered on my drives outside Calibre.

Calibre has nice search by 'title:', 'author:', and 'vl:' but eventually it has still the same problem of endless categorisation.

You can add tags to files instead of putting them in folders, I believe

Yes but conceptually it amounts to manual classification into multiple categories, which is just neverending work in my experience.

Manual classification is still useful to classify documents according to labels that are not present as strings in the books' contents though.

Tagging files on Windows is a horrible experience though, sadly.

Unfortunately, even that is particularly impractical on windows. I'm not sure exactly who thought up the disastrous library feature, but the net effect is that it makes it really, really hard to organize stuff into folders. The arbitrary top-level boxes MS thought of are always in the way; and they're sometimes an alias for a folder, but in other ways quite different. If truly everthing were easily mountable inside a library, then maybe it would work... but the reality is that people (shockingly) have multiple storage devices, and libraries work terribly with that. But I think worst is just the generally inconsistency; everything is "special" and nothing works quite like anything else. Add to that the fact that all kinds of programs store their "user" data in your documents, using poorly-names hardcoded folder names (including lots of microsoft apps), and pretty quickly everything just turns really messy. I don't think I know anybody - technically inclined or no - that seems to be using the library feature as it was intended; most people either just accept utter chaos, and treat the PC largely as throwaway or hope they can find something using search (oh boy); or they use a parallel structure entirely divorces from the libraries, and live with the fact that lots of the OS apps and views will then make you jump through hoops to access stuff where you actually store it, because the OS always offers stuff like libraries first.

Folders work. Tags can work. Search can work. The frankenstein folder-search monster that is windows 10 used as designed - that simply doesn't work for anybody.

Yea I was thinking about this and I never use OS search either. I suspect the reason it's "broken" is because Microsoft has the data that says most people don't use the feature and therefore it's not worth the improvement cost.

But they've just recently, with 1903, revamped Explorer as well as taskbar search.

In general, I find it very hard to believe this is a people few users rely on. It's the primary way to launch programs for me.

Do you have a neat and organized desktop? Most people just have a mess of shortcuts and that's how they launch programs. But also consider that most people use maybe 2 or 3 apps all the time and rarely explore outside of that.

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