am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.
At my company we use M-Files, which is a document storage system that prides itself in not using folders. “No more searching for the file in thousands of folders”, they proclaim. It’s all a huge dump of files. To find files you need to tag them when checking them in. Later you search via these tags.
Guess what happens: All documents are either untagged or they’re tagged with wildly unhelpful tags. So in reality you can’t find shit. You can’t even make a sensible guess as to where a file might be and check the 3–5 folders that come to mind, because there are no folders.
M-Files is a black hole for information. No, scratch that. Even black holes radiate out the information they receive. M-Files doesn’t.
In my last company we used a system called windchill. Technically they had folders. Previously we used a different system. But when we switched to windchill no one had time to actually sort and organize the tens of thousands of documents. As a result everything just got dropped in the root folder.
To make it worse there was no enforced naming scheme… Plan for… Thing’s plan… Protocol for execution of thing… Ip of thing… Thing’s up… Protocol of thing… Plan of thing… All valid. And in 5 years when your 3rd replacement is trying to find it… Alcoholism is a serious disorder
No, scratch that. Even black holes radiate out the information they receive. M-Files doesn’t.
That is an amazing zinger!
Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”?
All files are references. But you have always been able to put a reference to one file in multiple folders by using hard links.
Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
find dir1 dir2 dir3 -name '*.x' -type fdeleted by creator
No no, you see, most people like organisation. Also, it’s intuitive as it is analagous to actual folders that store actual files. It would be kind of weird if you could store a file in multiple folders. What would that even mean? If you delete a file from one folder, is it deleted in the other? Folders aren’t meant to be labels (labels are labels), they’re locations. Your toothbrush is in the bathroom, pots and pans in the kitchen, etc.
Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”?
You can do this… Hard links. Neither file is more “canonical” than the other.
You can have a file in 2 folders, they’re called hardlinks
I can’t say I disagree, but I am ignorant of what the alternatives would be. A tagged database of files so you can query by tag, filename, or such?
You have to think in ‘information dimensionality’. A yes/no toggle is 0D, a list is 1D, a list of lists (std hierarchy) are 2D, a list of list of list are 3D etc. All information storage types are one of these dimensions. Think of a graph-base file system with nodes and edges between everything. Now, imagine a filesystem where you flick a switch and the whole structure shows another pov ? Maybe you want the whole thing to be shown as file-type hiearchy, or only parts of it. Maybe you need to show movement in the structure, so everything are in a temporal/spatial hierarchy, maybe you are only interested in dependencies ? Relations ? Other ‘weird’ metrics ? …and so on. The main problem is to manage, find and show the needed information in a higher-dimentional fs.
Technically a normal file is also a list, or another ordered structure, but in this sense, they are just a node with further dimensionality.
There’s a TON of information layers locked away in our normal filesystem hierarchy, so OP are perfectly right, and people here have no imagination or even a world model of information structures…
What is your alternative non-folder solution?
SQlite 😅
Can you please save this somewhere you’ll find it in 10 years?
Not sure why people defend an archaic organization form here - reflex ?
You are perfectly right that files and folders are simplistic, and should naturally adapt to the pov that are more information rich/valuable. Hoomans tend to collapse a high-dimensional structures to 0D to 3D, so we can manage the information. In that sense, a std hierarchy is only ONE pov over a ton of pov over the same content. A standard hierarchy is only a low 2D dimension structure that are our first attempt at organizing information. It’s not wrong - just imprecise af.
Anyway, hardlinks are a small step up, can build wild static structures (like a oneshot filesystem in Guix), but is cumbersome to control in multi-dimensional information structures. Likely not what you want, but look into fuse file systems if you want to move on to a dynamic file system hierarchy. An interesting one is a tag file system. It turns a standard limited hierarchy into a much more dynamic file-structure where a file can - and does - belong to a bunch of tags - file type, size, group, comments, whatnot. There are many many fuse fs that can convert anything into a better structured file system. Tagging is a step up from a dumb 2D hierarchy, but maybe a graph file system is the ultimate freeform dynamic filesystem that can present all the pov’s we could possible need ?
Go for it.
