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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

The essay did not convince me the need to rethink the desktop or sufficiently explain the idea of fragments versus work products.

Yes, search is great when it works. You know what also works? Organization. I used search within folders of very large category to rapidly narrow stuff down.

If the desktop ain't broke, it doesn't need fixing.

Instead, I am thinking about all the dark patterns and anti-patterns, as well as performance hog, endless constant update, as well naggers trying to upsell you shit.

There's a reason why I returned to linux. Microsoft, please fix your shit.

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This works great if you are dealing with files, and are disciplined enough to organise them, but in other cases it turns into a big mess. My wife is not disciplined in that way so her computer has many layers deep of temporary and non-temporary documents on the Desktop, and Windows is constantly complaining there is no disk space. Her iPhone is the same because of podcasts and WhatsApp groups that auto-download media but never clear out the old stuff.

The idea of fragments as TFA discusses really resonated with me, because most of my life is not in files. Giving a real example, a few months ago I read a blog post about some house planning software (I'm in the process of building a house), and later needed to refer back to it. I didn't save it anywhere (bookmark, save as PDF, Notion/Roam etc) because it didn't seem that important at the time.

Its the same if you watch a YouTube video or read an article here. Sure you could take notes and save those notes in a text file that you can later search, but who has the time to that for every single piece of content they consume?

Something like Spotlight is a good start, but it needs much more meta-data. All of your search and watch history needs to be there, but in a world that's becoming every more siloed (how do I record the photo a friend shared with me a few months ago on Facebook Messenger?) that's tricky.

The problem with magical solutions like the fragment idea is that they require magic to implement.

Most software can't be bothered to integrate rich paste support (e.g. the way you can paste an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document), and we expect them to implement a complex API to define these fragments in a way where the OS/Spotlight could actually build up that history?

This would be a massive undertaking requiring buy-in from every piece of software before it is even marginally usable. It is a pipe dream (and may even be a nightmare if it were realizable).

How would one organize better, by flooding the system with even more data? Fragments would be no different than files, just smaller, yet still objects to organize away. Whats neccessary are tools which need to make use if them, and for this there were many many attempts over the years. Several more are still going even now. But all of them fail, because the basic problem still can't be solved by software, which is the responsability of the user to organize their stuff.

> Its the same if you watch a YouTube video or read an article here. Sure you could take notes and save those notes in a text file that you can later search, but who has the time to that for every single piece of content they consume?

Those already exist. The browser has them all in it's history. Google similar has many if them stored for their services. To some degree they use them for the user, but there is simply limited use for those informations.

The biggest thing I miss in the file folder paradigm is dividers/sections. Like folders, but without nesting.

I used to have a tendency to over-categorize and nest things too deeply, which makes them hard to find again. Concrete example: nesting classes by semester. When looking back for something, I would usually remember what class it was, but I'd often forget the semester. So now I have to search through a bunch of folders (manually or automatically) to find it. Ugh. A flat structure is much easier to follow.

However, I still want all my classes grouped together when I'm listing them. Currently the only way I know to achieve this is by adding a prefix to the file or folder name. This works, but you end up with some grotesque names. The implementation could be regular folders with a flag to indicate their contents should be displayed inline one level above.

I've started putting timestamps at the start of filenames recently and is been working pretty well. yyyymmddhhmmss, then an optional filename if needed. it might still be your idea of grotesque, and the timestamp does take up a bit of space unfortunately but at least its consistent.

going with your example above, it would allow you to just have folders for classes and then have files from all years in the same class folder. then you can sort of hack together a divider feature by adding some brightly coloured jpgs with a timestamp at the start of the year which would let you see at a glance where each year starts and ends.

it also helps if your file browser will remember to open each folder with the newest files show first at the top

How many people are actually effectively organizing their data in files? If a system doesn't work for vast majority of users, then it does deserve rethinking. Its great that desktop model works for you, but I strongly suspect you are not representative of the greater user base.

Rethinking is fine, if it leads to action. If the desktop isn't working for the vast majority of users, then it's certainly the prerogative of anyone in the world to code up something which is guaranteed to make every one of those users happy.

>If a system doesn't work for vast majority of users, then it does deserve rethinking.

No, if a commercial for profit system doesn't work for the vast majority of users, then it does deserve rethinking. Linux is a great example of an operating system that was not written for the highest profitable denominator until recently.

I feel like the author’s proposed solution of better searching through tagging and semantic associations over manual organization also requires user care and effort. I don’t think the desktop model is broken so much as the average person isn’t very organized to begin with.

This tagging idea resurfaces every few years. I have to confess I don’t really see where the revolutionary improvement is. Filenames are already namespaced tags and symlinks allow for multiple tags. Not quite the same thing, I know, but close enough for tagging to appear to me to be a convenient enhancement rather than something game changing.

And as you imply, when you have a lot of files that you need to organise, you tend to start compiling them into directories.

So your solution to organizing files... is more files? How would multiple files use the same "tag" under that scheme, without duplicating it everywhere?

Tags are very powerful if used properly. They describe sets by definition and allow quick filtering with intersections and other set operations. If the filtering is a bit smarter it can support boolean operators, or use tag distance and order as a meaningful data point so that e.g. "discussion board" doesn't return the same results as "discussion snow board".

They're a more flexible way to organize data than hierarchical directories. Hierarchy can easily be expressed with tags (use any character as separator, e.g. "os.linux"), but files and directories are not nearly as expressive enough for all the use cases tags can be used for.

I've been working on a file organization system that incorporates tags, and I must say I agree with the GP. Tags improve display and search over hierarchies, but they require no less discipline on the part of the user. Without some way to automatically mass-assign meaningful tags to items, which is an insanely difficult problem in the general case, the user is forced to manually tag every single item they add to the system. AI could help do this, but not much. First, consider that mistagging an item can make it practically impossible to find again. Second, consider that semantic tagging can be almost arbitrarily abstract; imagine tagging a text document with "cyberpunk" or an image file with "parody".

The genius of Google search was leveraging hyperlinks to add semantics. The only way I can see something somewhat equivalent happening is by exposing all my interactions incl. e.g. the juggling and browsing of other documents beyond the one worked on to search. I would find this scary.

> So your solution to organizing files... is more files? How would multiple files use the same "tag" under that scheme, without duplicating it everywhere?

You could put the same file in multiple directories. You could have a file in ~/vat and symlink it to ~/urgent and ~/accountant.

You're right, that could work in theory. In practice it would be difficult to manage and keep track of all the links, update them if the file is moved, etc. I suppose hard links would avoid that, so that might be a reasonable way to implement tags, I agree. My main goal would be to manage this via a tag-like UI, so that I don't have to do this manually. And at that point I might as well just store the metadata in a proper DB instead of the filesystem...

I'm not dismissing the utility of tags, and I like your idea. I'd definitely install it as an application and give it a go.

I'm really addressing the argument that tags are a revolutionary change that should replace the directory-based filesystem entirely. The cost seems too high to justify the benefit.

Yeah, it still requires management and discipline from the user for it to be useful. FWIW I use Pinboard daily and finding something among thousands of bookmarks is a breeze. I can usually find what I'm looking for with a single tag or an intersection of just two tags. Finding anything on the filesystem is much more difficult, even with good directory structure discipline.

I'm not actually interested in building such a system, it's been done before[1,2]. Though I haven't actually used any extensively, since it does require a shift in how file management is done, and I'm quite familiar with filesystems to bother to change, but it's on my list. :)

[1]: https://tmsu.org/

[2]: https://www.tagsistant.net/

The majority of users don't even realize they're interacting with files. The mantle falls entirely on developers to ensure that their programs are simple.

Most users have no idea of what is even possible with a computer, organization-wise.

I don't disagree that interfaces should be designed for users, but they should be designed to EMPOWER and teach users, not to just dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Because, let's face it, most people are awful at organizing stuff that materially matters a lot to their lives and well-being.

Except it does not work for those users because automatically managing vast unordered, uncategorized data sets is not a problem we know how to solve. If we knew how to solve that problem, we could just implement it in the existing hierarchical manually-organized paradigm by just having one hierarchical level and dumping all your data into it. Given that the new model fits in the old model, the only reason for demolishing the old model is for efficiency reasons and there is very little in the way of efficiency that can be gained by converting the relatively shallow organizational trees that are commonly used for a single-level store.

Why do I believe we do not know how to solve the problem? As the article inadvertently points out, the unorganized data they want is not accessible and Mac Spotlight, a tool that operates on unorganized data, does an "OK Job, but not a miraculous one". If Apple knew how to super search the vast trove of unorganized data and file formats for content-specific data and always get it right would there be any reason they would not do so? It would clearly be strictly superior to their existing offering. For that matter, they bring up browsing history in Safari which is an even easier problem and also claim it hardly works. For evidence outside of Apple, think of all the in-app search systems that can barely even search plaintext for things you know exist. I frequently have problems with Gmail not finding emails despite giving exact string matches. These problems are all subsets of the proposed problem, which must be solved to solve the harder problem, and which would offer immediate material benefits for their solution yet do not or barely exist.

The problem is not a mismatch between solution and user workflow. The problem is that we do not know how to solve the problem for all meaningful workflows. The best we have achieved is creating and supporting a workflow that allows the problem to be solved in many useful cases. Luckily, if the problem can actually be solved in the future, it can easily be bolted onto the existing solution to test viability before going all-in.

> It would clearly be strictly superior to their existing offering. For that matter, they bring up browsing history in Safari which is an even easier problem and also claim it hardly works. For evidence outside of Apple

For evidence outside of Apple, just try to use browser history in Chrome or Firefox. They're completely unreliable, entirely useless. For me, it's 50/50 chance I'll get a result when searching for a site that I visited few days earlier.

> think of all the in-app search systems that can barely even search plaintext for things you know exist

Exactly.

Most of the search systems I've worked with have one, big problem: they don't feel reliable. You type in a query, a system starts a search. You get some indicator of progress, which eventually expires. Typically, search systems don't tell you if the search was exhaustive - did it check every possible thing that could match, or did it bail out after hitting some time limit? They also often meddle with the query, modifying it or doing fuzzy matches, in ways not communicated to you in the user interface. With such systems, if the thing I'm looking for isn't in the result set, I don't feel confident it isn't there.

Manual file organization (or any direct data access) has this property of being exhaustive: a file is either there or it isn't. Direct file access means that if you don't trust your file searcher, you can always look for yourself.

There are many other challenges ahead if we want "universal search" to work, but a big step forward would be addressing these trust issues. It's entirely an UI issue. Instead of "0 results found", say "0 results found after searching contents of all text files in Documents folder (symbolic links not followed)". Instead of "about 123 results", say "123 results found, there may be more matches, [click here] to read about limitations of the search method".

(And on a general point: users aren't as dumb as the common claim is. Our industry is treating them as dumb, taking away every opportunity to learn and build mental models - and then complains that users "are dumb".)

> How many people are actually effectively organizing their data in files?

Most people, in their jobs, every day.

Just as they did before the advent of computers, too.

You'll get a biased answer because you'll include a group of people who won't succeed no matter what approach you take. People have tried that approach and ended up with things like Microsoft Bob.

The real question is what is effective for individuals and business trying to accomplish real work, who are at least somewhat capable of learning or training staff.

Just a counterpoint: I literally save every document to one giant folder, and give every file a longer descriptive name so I'll be able to search for it easily.

I've been doing this for almost ten years, and it works great.

This is still organization, just using file names instead of subfolders.

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