Re:Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for produc...
by kijin on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @07:40PM
(#10935242)
I want hierarchical tags, e.g. "comp.lang.ruby.rails" instead of just "ruby" and "rails". And of course, when I search "comp.lang.ruby", I want to see results from all of its children.
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.
Re:Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for produc...
by mynewtb on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @08:29PM
(#10935435)
Do they really have to be hierarchical? Your example would work with AND.
Re:Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for produc...
by kijin on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @08:18AM
(#10937815)
What if I have two dozen ruby-related tags, not just rails? In order to search all of them without hierarchical tags, I would have to either add the "ruby" tag to all of them, or run a search with a lot of ANDs.
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.
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.