Comment by gglitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gglitch | Hacker News Reader

As this thread currently has a lot of critics, I just want to put in a personal plug for JD. I've been using it for some time now for family and personal data and it has been enormously helpful. It's true that it is occasionally vexing to have to choose one category for a given thing, but (a) it's usually not, (b) it's ok to reorganize categories, (c) I have found that often if there's something important that fits equally well in more than one category, (c1) either I need to refactor my categories, or (c2) it's probably going to be ok if I just pick one and allow myself to recategorize later. This almost never happens anyway.

And in the mean time, all my stuff is searchable, browsable, findable, and tidy.

I'm not saying it will work equally well in all environments or for all purposes, but for mine, it solved many years' worth of stress.

> it's ok to reorganize categories

This is an important point. A person’s interests and areas of responsibility evolve over time; so refactoring is not only permissible; it’s probably also helpful to unload accumulated organizational cruft that’s no longer relevant.

When it comes to indecision about where a file goes, I’ll often just place a .txt file in the “wrong” location pointing to the correct spot. Or an alias.

I have a similar experience for personal life. I use this too - it's imperfect, but it's a nice balance of complexity and utility that doesn't get in the way once you set it up.

When you refactor, do you have to renumber everything in the categories you refactored? Isn't that a lot of work, and doesn't it break the whole system if you can't rely on the JD numbers to be permanent?

If you refactor, how does that affect email searches including pre-refactor subject lines?

I imagine you could just reply to the old thread with the new category.id. Or only reply to yourself if it's only your organization system. Email search should include the email bodies.

(I'm not a user of this; just guessing)

Agreed. I find this useful too. Especially for random stuff I use once a year.

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