Surely that's the tagging. I use tags extensively on my Mac because it's so useful to me but it's clearly an afterthought for Apple, and I struggle to use it at times.

Making tags a first class citizen would improve things immensely. The search index being a first class citizen again, would also improve things - why should I find Spotlight indexes loitering in the dark corners of my filesystem as dot files? I know there's a file index kept somewhere full of inodes and suchlike, why isn't search index data kept with it?

I also don't know why I have to rely on file system watchers that seem to be external to the file system and thus eventually sucking vast amounts of CPU when a hook into the main index would suffice. I don't write file systems so I can't tell why this is the case, or in fact, if it is the case but appears to me that it isn't every time I need to kill a file watcher.

Most of the suggestions in the article seemed good to me (immutable files, smaller meta data pages etc), I'm sure there are others around, but I'm also not sure why there's a need among some to protect the status quo by relying on good behaviour, of all things.

With Didgets, tags are an integral part of the system. They don't get lost or forgotten when you copy a file from one place to another. Searches are a native part of the system as well so you aren't relying on a separate indexing service that has its own database somewhere else. BTW, managing file data using folders and tags are just a few of the features of the system. I found out the columnar stores I used for tagging, were easily used to also form relational tables. I can load in a 100 million row, 40 column table and do queries against it much faster than the same data loaded into Postgres, MySQL or SQL server.

> I use tags extensively on my Mac...

In other words, you have developed a disciplined habit of tagging your files. If I had a penny...

Where's the "don't need X" part? Have I dismissed hierarchical file systems out of hand? Where did I suggest greater discipline should be the approach.

I also use automated tools to help me with the tagging but I think that it's not a magic bullet - did I claim it was?

No, and I didn't do any of the other things I asked for evidence of either.

So, if I had a penny for every time someone misquoted me I'd have a penny more right now.