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Comment by glup | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I've decided 75%+ of stuff is transitory and doesn't deserve the time to be filed into a hierarchical local file system, so I just leave it all in Downloads on OS X. Github, Overleaf, Google Docs, and email has all the critical stuff. And of course I have full backups for years. This horrifies some people, but has worked well for me for about 5 years.

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I could really use not a full download-to dialog on every save in my browser, but just a prompt for a very small set of download locations I've defined, possibly filtered by extension (.jpg -> 'photos_to_sort' or 'memes' or 'temp_junk' as my options)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/save-in/

this functionality is also available in the venerable DTA

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/

Try using Hazel (macOS-only) to auto-file stuff for you based on whatever naming conventions or file extensions you want. It’s amazing.

Similar strategy: I treat my desktop as a temporary workspace. Anything transient goes there, and a cron job clears out unused files automatically:

    find ~/Desktop/ -atime +3d  -maxdepth 1  \( -type d -o  -type f \) -exec trash "{}" \;

If I really need something that gets deleted, I can go to my backups.

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