Idea: Labels in OS instead of folders | Hacker News Reader

Idea: Labels in OS instead of folders

3 pointsshabda6 comments

Why is that OS continue to insist that I keep my files in folders and directories.

Instead wont it be more user friendly to have labels which you apply to files, instead of putting them in folders?

For example, I have a file which which I want to label as "mindmap, django, project31" so that one year later I can find them wheter I am looking for mindmaps, or django or project31 files. Instead if I am looking for a particular mindmap, I need to remember all details about it.

Essentially, labels are more user friendly(than folders). Why not use them on OS level?

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I remember reading a USENIX paper on doing just this, by mapping each filename-related syscall to different semantics. Essentially 'ls /foo/bar/' would list the same files as 'ls /bar/foo/'. This paper on 'TagFS' is not it, but close enough:

http://semfs.ontoware.org/pubs/2006-09-iknow2006-tagfs.pdf

If I am going to be opinionated this is not done to OSes because of all the applications written for the current semantics.

If I was given funding to make file tagging happen, then I would forget retrofitting the OS-level file system. My attack angle would be in the GUI making it appear as files are tagged. Perhaps by changing the popular applications to connect to a daemon that handles persistent storage and tagging of blobs.

The regular user wants to know as little as possible about the file system anyway. Their concept of stored files are those that can be seen as icons in their desktop. Pure hiearchical paths are a thing for programmers and power users (sadly?).

Oh also, while going for tagging things, RDF is even more generalized, allowing you to classify tags them self. Each application might want to tag files they create or modify with an application-class of tag. (date-class tags, format-class tags, author-class tags,...)

Each application should implicitly add as many tags as it can when saving things (application name, resource kind, content-type, author, date, icon, etc).

This would allow you to get files by recalling "that image i shopped up in gimp last month".

Hierarchical file systems were great when you had a limited number of files that you personally had to deal with. The desktop metaphor was great when your hard drive was 4 megs. When its 500 gigs, its just plain broken.

The Be File System had both a hfs part plus the far more interesting queryable database part where the user or an application could attach arbitrary data to fs entries. so you could have contacts stored in the fs that were searchable, email 'folders' that you could interact with via the OS and far far more. Alas, that more or less died with with Be although every now and then something else pops up but doesn't get any traction.

Another interesting idea was lifestreams which represented all your data as a series of versioned documents stretching back through time. you could search by creation or modification date or search based on content. See: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

Hopefully sooner rather than later, we can ditch the hfs altogether or at least hide it and keep for backwards compatibility.

You can, sort of - create "mindmap", "django", and "project31" directories and in each of them put a symbolic link to your file. Tagging, the unix way. A script or GUI for doing that might be useful, maybe.

in a way folders are already labels...

documents django mynewsite applogic

documents/django/mynewsite/applogic

Removing a folder structure doesnt seem like an improvement to me: if I take 3000 files and tag them as LabelX it becomes useless for filtering. Conversely if I use 500 very specific labels for those files (i.e. multiple labels per file) filtering becomes a pain.

Directories with huge number of files are slower to access. You could look at extended attributes (xattr) feature of most *NIX's. This is user defined information which could easily be used in the manner that you suggest. A modified file manager would be able to handle the additional capabilities. Some music and photo management programs implement something similar so perhaps that could be used as a strarting point.

Mac OS X has tagging implemented in a nice way. I use it all the time. Compatible with the directory hierarchy. Some refer to it as a hack in the bad sense of the word, but IMHO it isn't.

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