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Comment by ricg | Hacker News Reader

> NEED HIERARCHY? Use directories — also known as folders.

I really wish I could define a custom order for files in a directory. A folder hierarchy is almost an outline, but not quite.

Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain.

Are there file systems that allow for a custom order of files/folders?

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> Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain.

BASIC line numbering:

  010_...

  020_...

  030_...

I was just thinking about this at the weekend. One approach is to use a tool that supports [[Wiki-style Linking]], and have a kind of index/table of contents/home page for your notes.

That's what I do today in my own app. I have a "table of contents" file in each folder. Ideally the file system would support that out of the box, but maybe a first step could be to standardize such a TOC file...?

I suppose the question is where you want the sorted version to appear. In the output of `ls`? You could write a wrapper to `ls`, maybe?

In the system's file explorer (Finder/Windows File Explorer).

This would give me a visual outline and the ability to open any file with its corresponding app.

Imagine writing a book and using folders as chapters. You could then write individual pages with different apps, say some plain text, some Word documents, a few spreadsheets, images, videos, etc.

Would it be better to have something like a plain text page to hold the outline, with links to individual files?

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