Ask HN: A Better Way to Organize Project Files for Freelencers?

Every year I work on many different projects, from design, to coding, to 3D design, to personal projects. My usual model currently is to create folders for each project and after I am done with them file the folder in some kind of logical tree structure.

But, let's say I have a project that involves an ESP32 micro-controller and a specific client. Sometimes I want to list all my projects that are related to ESP32, sometimes I want to list all the projects that relate to a specific client, and sometimes I just want to list all the projects that I started in 2020, or any other given year.

I know tags would work well for this task, but tags are not very portable, and once you have several dozen tags it becomes unwieldy. Are there any other organizing solutions out there that you use.

My ideal solution would be to put a PROJINFO.md file inside each project folder and have some kind of system that would allow me to search the contents of the PROJINFO.md files, but instead of giving me a list of those files it would return a list of containing directories.

But, perhaps there is an even better solution that you could suggest. The goals are:

1. Portable System that can be stored on ExFAT drive, if need be. 2. Ability to search for projects by different attributes or tags. It's fine if I have to go through all my past projects and tag them or create INFO files in them. 3. Some kind of tool with UI would be nice, but CLI is ok too, as long as the system can work on Mac and Linux (Win would be nice too).

Any recommendations or maybe just a wholesale different approach to achieve the same result?