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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too?

Example. My "The Battle of Evermore" mp3 could live in the following typed categories:

  "FileHash:blahblablahblah"
  "iNode: blahblahblah"
  "Title: The Battle of Evermore"
  "Artist:Led Zeppelin"
  "Album:Led Zeppelin IV"
  "Collection:Project: LotR RotK Music Video"
  "Playlist:Music: Swordfightin' Songs"

etc etc

Is that so wrong? If you use a rigorous enough metadata type system, you could program it too!

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> I just want my filesystem to be categorical instead of hierarchical. Maybe some use of metadata types would make it easier to avoid collisions too?

What's weird is that the very first file system the Mac used was very close to this. MFS didn't support true directories; folders were an illusion provided by the Finder. Be OS, I believe, was the closest to your ideal that was ever developed, but it was considered too alien and "late" for it to have ever gotten traction. Just like the automobile got saddled with the internal combustion engine and manual wheel-based control, personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems.

personal computers got stuck with x86 and hierarchical file systems

And UNIX. Can I have my Lisp machine back, please?

(OK, so I never had a Lisp machine. But I want one :P)

But with lexical scoping!

What I would like is something like that: a hierarchial file system that also have metadata like you describe. So you'd be able to access files in the traditional way, but there would also be an API (and gui and command line tools) that would return all files matching criteria in the metadata.

Such file systems already exist. Take a look at HFS+ and Spotlight in OS X Leopard. It is not the only example.

MacOS's spotlight feature is somewhat close to what you're describing - and it can be extended to index/search metadata from file formats not in its default list.

That being said, it would be nice if such abilities can be extended to 3rd party developers, so that I can query the OS with a string and have relevant files come back.

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