A better search and tagging can be valuable tools. But no matter how good search gets, it will not stop users from putting files untagged into one big junk folder.
Being able to think about how to order your files is a fundamental skill in this day and age and doing this on a big scale does indeed require discipline.
IMO it is just a false hope to think tags would help with the root cause of a lack of care about the data.
Being able to think about how to order your files is a fundamental skill in this day and age and doing this on a big scale does indeed require discipline.
I'm not sure that's true, because no one does that on mobile devices. Some people have even suggested that young people who've grown up with mobile phones struggle with filesystems because they have no experience of file management despite having plenty of experience of computing.
Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
The same is true to a lesser extent with online office suites. You don't need to know the name of a file in Google Docs - you refer to things by their titles.
Moving from file names to tags, or any meta data really, would be possible. Whether it'd be better is a matter of opinion.
> Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
I think the way Android does it is completely the wrong way around, as it makes it completely centered around apps, not documents. Making you a slave to the App, which in turn gets used to force you into using cloud services. It goes so far that you don't even have control over your files anymore, if you delete and App, the files created by that App will get deleted with it, you don't even get a warning.
I rarely use Android, but every interaction with it has been god awful. And from what I hear new version of Android will start making tools like SSHelper impossible, so you can't even workaround the madness anymore.
There are two main places where Android apps store files: within an application-private slice of the main filesystem, and the shared /sdcard (which, as its name implies, was originally a removable SD card, but nowadays is just another slice of the main filesystem). What the parent is complaining about is the former (and a per-application directory on the later), which is removed whenever the application is uninstalled (or the user tells Android to clear the application state); and unless you have root on the phone (or are looking at the per-application directory below /sdcard), or the application explicitly exports it, it's not even visible to any file explorer.
> Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
That is an inherent weakness of mobile OS's and prevents them from competing with traditional computers in workplaces. It works as long as you never want to do anything complicated with your computer, but most people working in offices needs the organization offered by a file system, not to mention how crippling this would be to use as a development environment.
We have systems, but they don’t need to be “files”.
On development environments: we manage all our code under version control, our IDE index all the sources and most of us navigate by pretty unusual ways. I guess we would be fine without any direct access to the fs as long as we had a layer that gave back streams of files we look for and a way to commit changes to git. For a lot of devs I think everything is already abstracted by their IDE.
A lot of people work the same. For instance navigating exclusively through links sent to them, their office app’s “recent documents” and the “open” dialogue with the folder they stored all their docs and might not completely understand where it is exactly (except if it’s straight their “Desktop” folder). I think a ton of adults get by with that on their everyday job.
I’m still largely pro-file-systems, but your comment made me think. Here’s some loose thoughts, just to get into the problem space.
I navigate my codebase at work primarily using the name of the entity I’m aiming to inspect or work on next (e.g. “Popup” or “uiEventStream”)
- usually using fuzzy search. This matches by file ame, but feasibly could operate by entity symbolic name to the same effect
- increasingly using VSCode’s “find references”, which already operates by entity name (at least that’s now the UI appears)
However.. I also use the file tree, because important and meaningful application structure is encoded in the tree. The tree (and its node namez) gives me sections of the app, collections of entity types, and hints how they’re connected. This is invaluable. It helps new colleagues learn the application structure and it helps old hands get to what they want faster. It forms a “silent” background context against which all entity-based decisions get made.
The structure could be encoded as tags, with all the files dumped in a single directory. I have yet to see a tagging interface work as well for tag hierarchies as a directory tree works.
Tag hierarchies are a specialised use, or extension of generalised tags. Tagging systems typically emphasise (through UI and explanatory notes) the unstructured approach. Structure and unstructure are basically opposed so making a single UI work for both seems problematic. Educating users, most of whom wont use the word “taxonomy” in daily life, how to use a tool supporting a model with an almost inherent self-contraction seems like a mammoth task.
To add to that, there is IMO a renaissance of “fuzzy” navigation, with macos’ quick search (the Sherlock/quicksilver clone), and tools like Obsidian spreading the model of moving to apps and file by a set of partial keywords.
I agree with you that a tree structure is important, the same way people still look at trees to navigate pages on most sites, going through categories, sub-categories etc.. More and more the tree is just dissociated with the actual representation, the same ways urls don’t exactly match the site structure on so many sites.
I’d imagine the tags would have some hierarchical relations if we were to use tags exclusively.
Many programming languages have a tagging system for that: namespaces, packages, etc.
Often they have a close mapping to filesystem, but with IDE support that isn't strictly needed. (In reality however it currently is, as the filesystem is the language agnostic common interface between version control system, IDE, etc.)
>Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
... and completely cripple the user's creative powers, making him a passive consumer. you cannot get serious work done on mobile and that is as true now as it was ten years ago.
> Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
It's ok when you have a file type exclusive to an app AND the app provides export functionality. But it breaks as soon as you need to share files between apps.
Arguably, this is more about implementations than the principle, but ask any musician about the IOS music apps and they'll tell you they're great... except the file management.
> Mobiles have shown that it's possible to remove the concept of files entirely from the user facing side of an OS.
File browsers got very popular very quickly on Android and there is a bundled one on there now. So mobile has shown that despite the designers attempt to deprecate files, it didn't work out.
I strongly doubt that regular users ever bothered to use Android's file system.
If there are even files involved, most people will just use the app that received or created that file to interact with it. Especially since apps sometimes put files in completely random places, that even I as a technical person have trouble finding.
> I'm not sure that's true, because no one does that on mobile devices.
Even my mother sorts her pictures into gallery folders. Granted – a lot of sorting on mobile happens automatically (per app).
But "consumer devices don't need an accessible file system" is not a good argument to extrapolate that to machines people use productively. Don't get me wrong, I do think we can improve filesystems in terms of usability – I just don't think having some of it in your head will go away any time soon (and if it does, it will not be an improvement).
My point is, that in a productive environment the filesystem becomes part of your brain, just like a carpenter's workshop becomes part of their brain. This is not a bug, it is a feature. You don't need to think about where things are, because you arranged your environment in a way that suits the tasks you are doing 99% of the time. Now if someone came in and arranged the tools for you, moved them around automatically by their own logic, chances are that it doesn't fit your current task, your personal preferences, etc.
Moving from a world where you blindly know where something is, to one where you have to guesstimate what another entity "thought" would be an appropriate place for the thing they are looking for is not progress. If you were to make a automatic system that can read thoughts and put the file precisely in the place people are expecting it to be – that would be an improvement, but everything else not so much.
The key difference for mehere is the one between productive work and consumption: If you are in a space where you are consuming (e.g. a food on a buffet) it is totally acceptable to not have it your way. Who cares if it takes you 5 seconds more to find the balsamico for your salad? Tasks that you don't do productively like looking at pictures on your smartphone – who cares if it takes you a minute more to find a thing? But if you are a professional photographer and you look for that one picture you took in a specific session 4 years ago not a lot will beat a well built folder structure.
Because you don't really have valuabe data on a mobile phone. It's mainly just photos, and they are all in one folder ordered by date. So adding tags to that is a feasible strategy.
Everything else on the phone most people don't consider as permanent data, so it's not worth organizing it. You contacts are in the cloud, so are your chat logs,... And app configuration data can always be recreated with some effort.
Let's remove street addresses altogether, because that requires hard memorization, right? Instead let's all put any house of a city all along a contiguous space and refer to them via a description of their appearance.
I don't disagree with your premise that mobile abstracts away the file system. However many people do put rather a lot of effort into organizing files on mobile. I clean and sort my downloads folder just like on my computer, but more importantly the majority of people I know use folders to handle the now thousands of pictures we generate on mobile.
> Some people have even suggested that young people who've grown up with mobile phones struggle with filesystems because they have no experience of file management despite having plenty of experience of computing.
Currently teaching introductory programming at college level, can confirm.
> But no matter how good search gets, it will not stop users from putting files untagged into one big junk folder.
I personally don't see folders (or traditional file organization) and tags as competitive technologies. I think they're complementing each other very well. I generally put my stuff under well defined folders, but tag the notes (or the files if I have the capability).
95% of the time, I can just go to the folder and get what I need, but sometimes I need to search something which I don't remember whether I have it or think I misplaced. In that case file indexing and search really comes in handy.
I apply these methods at least in three places very enthusiastically: Pagico, Evernote and Tiddly Wiki. Both have hierarchical organization models (It's fixed in Evernote, not mandated in Pagico, and Tiddly is just free floating by nature), but they're meticulously tagged. I rarely use search in either of these. However this doesn't mean tags save me serious time or effort. I think both ways of organization is very useful, at the end of the day.
As a pet peeve, I really don't like this strong worded titles and posts. You don't have to kill something working well to enhance it with something to make it better for some or every use case.
I’m on the side of peoples who gave up on organization entirely, and have a stream of scanned documents with only the scanned date as the title for 99% of them.
The docs are OCRed and I retrieve them mostly by search, with tags for a few critical docs and by approximate dates for the rest if search by content fails completely.
This is viable, and there’s no way I’ll go back to manually setting up tags and names on all the docs that we scan in case it’s needed some day. It’s like asking everyone to do inbox zero with their mail, why would you put your time in the hand of uncontrolled external forces feeding you more info day after day?
> But no matter how good search gets, it will not stop users from putting files untagged into one big junk folder.
The difference is it's more likely the user will notice other tags the apply in each thing that would have been moved to 'junk' then if they had to more coarsely categorize all the junk in advance.
Being able to think about how to order your files is a fundamental skill in this day and age and doing this on a big scale does indeed require discipline.
IMO it is just a false hope to think tags would help with the root cause of a lack of care about the data.