In fact, a main reason I use i3 is because it is literally the least ideological tiling window manager when it comes to mouse use. The productivity gains I get out of tiling don't come from using the keyboard, they come from not having to deal with the (imo, especially in the post-1024x768 era) very messy overlapping window model. Things are where I expect. I can move them from one screen to another and sane things happen. Plugging in and unplugging a display doesn't make hash of my organization. Things are never buried under incomprehensible layers. And so on.
I agree, it was one of the things I was missing back when I was using i3 + Ubuntu as my daily machine. Now, I'm using OS X with Amethyst[1], which while it's less powerful than i3, combined with OS X's window management features I honestly feel like I get the best of both worlds. It's quite great, to be honest.
This sounds interesting. Would you care to elaborate?
I think the broader problem is that there is this awkward question of where tags belong in the application heirarchy. Right now most media files embed tags while text files do not. Binary files certainly do not, and folders are not true files and thus are not on-disk things to put tags on, they are usually filesystem constructs in a data tree somewhere.
Your file indexer could maintain the tags database, but then they are not file-portable. They could be part of the extended file traits in your filesystem, but then filesystems lacking support (including online uploads) would drop them. Thus we are at a point where tagging is done on a per-format basis, and thus some files are just not taggable but instead require indexing.
You would probably want to throw a semantic relevancy engine on top of that to associate vocabulary with similar terms, so if i search for food i can get things like cookie as a related search term.
I will try it soon with ranger [2], I think managing tags with it won't be a problem as you can call the shell where you want.
https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-de...
Ditto, I use tags heavily for web content and photos and would love to do the same for local files.
Seems that it might be possible to overload soft-links to do the job - create a hierarchy of tags and then put a soft link for each file in the relevant place. That way you could use current filesystems and filemanagers whilst you develop the concept and apps.
Someone mentioned file searches in Ubuntu (using Baloo) but the default file manager needs to have an interface to apply tags as a MVP og file tagging.
The problem with traditional hierarchical organization is that objects often belong to multiple categories. With hierarchical tags, that problem disappears because you can easily assign multiple tags to the same object.
Actually, we can already do this with hierarchical filesystems and hard (not soft) links.
I already do this to some extent with my 11,000+ bookmarks on Pinboard. Entering the Usenet-style tags is really easy thanks to autocomplete, which also helps me avoid ending up with misspelled tags. Pinboard currently lacks searching by tag prefix, but it's trivial to script it locally using the API.
But with i3, I have keybindings to "open the last browser window i used" or "open the last gvim window i opened." I can tile them in different workspaces as I please extremely efficiently and quickly, and move them around as needed. I can move much faster using the keyboard than when I'm in my Windows machine. Having this tiling ability on a tablet seems odd to me.
I am kind of getting tired of the "attacks" on the traditional desktop interface. People just don't want to admit that just because tablets exist they are not a superior interface. Just a different one.
The interface they propose is beautiful but it would really have to walk a thin, thin line between usability and screen space.
I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. Obviously then you get into the problem of managing your tags (a tree-based filesystem solves this problem naturally).