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Files, Folders, and SearchFiles, Folders, and SearchPosted Oct 25, 2010 21:59 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) by rahvin Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)
While I generally agree with you, keep in mind that the modern generation of search solutions tends to search the contents of files, not just their names.
Both KDE and MacOS X have done a lot of work in this direction, and for a lot of the Mac people I've met it's become indispensable. (In KDE people still tend to turn it off because the indexing overhead has often been too noticable.)
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Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 25, 2010 22:51 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Tracker is pretty good. I've used it in the past, but I don't have it turned on right now.
It works and I think something like ZeitGeist would actually be REALLY F-ING useful for me at work.
For folders I frequently use in a GUI I arrange things according to date. When I am on the command line I've started using 'ls -ltr' habitually.
There comes a time when managing files manually and having well-laid out directories for managing information just does not scale.
Search helps a lot, but it would be even more useful to find ways to naturally be able to track _relationships_ between data. That would be fantastic.
Anybody who thinks that directory/file structure for managing information manually by humans....
How many times (and be honest) you were browsing the internet and found some interesting image or pdf or tarball or anything and you downloaded it and openned up in the default application.... and then _later_on_, maybe hours or weeks or months later decided that you wanted to look at that file again you just ended up searching the internet for it _again_ and _redownloaded_ it just because it was quicker and you were in a hurry?
I don't know about you, but it's much easier to remember text in a document, how I found a document, or relationships between different data (in some way shape or form) then it is to remember what I did with a file after I was done with it.
Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 7:57 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
"Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way."
I miss FAR (http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en) on Linux, it's _the_ best file manager in existence. Everything else seems clunky in comparison, including the 'most advanced' GUI managers like Dolphin in KDE.
Try it on Windows. Though it does have a steep learning curve, kinda like emacs/vim.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:34 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
It only _looks_ like, unfortunately. It's nowhere close in functionality and ease of use.
There's a project to resurrect MC: http://www.midnight-commander.org/ - it _might_ one day produce FAR's rival. But it's still not comparable, so far.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:20 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
It's a gui, but have you tried Kommander?
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 17:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Do you mean 'Krusader'?
I think, I've tried all the two-panel managers in Linux. http://freshmeat.net/projects/XNorthernCaptain/ is most close to FAR in 'spirit' but its functionality is severely lacking.
It's certainly possible to live in Linux without file managers, but sometimes it's almost painful to write series of commands which can be done in a few keypresses in a good file manager. Does not happen that often, so it's not a deal-breaker.
I guess, users of vim/emacs feel the same when they are forced to use less powerful editors.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:56 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I actually think there's a need for both methods, applied to mostly different files. There are files that are part of a larger logical structure (source files in a project or chapters in a book you're writing), and these are stable enough to get a familiar filesystem location and the files have familiar names; there are also files that are not given memorable paths or names (either because the user doesn't expect to need them again, because the user didn't think about naming, or because the user's choice of name turned out not to be memorable), and these can be found with search.
I think the directory method is several orders of magnitude more effective at handling those files for which it is at all useful, so abandoning it would make certain important things extremely inefficient for many people. But it's also nearly useless for many other things, and search is better for those. In real life, I don't put every paper I have into some folder or other, because that kind of classification doesn't really make sense for everything; but I do put all of my tax records for the same year into a folder, and even having an effective content search wouldn't mean I could live without these folders, because I sometimes need to go through exactly those documents, and they don't share any content features which are distinctive.
I'd actually really like to see a system where users get some storage with names and some storage that's indexed, where either can be used but the defaults are sensible. Mainly, I think that files should only be in some particular directory when created with a "New File In This Directory" interface, and otherwise they're all in a single directory with random names that gets indexed. That is, using filenames for files should be supported and efficient, but there shouldn't be any encouragement to do it except when the user actually wants to.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 28, 2010 7:25 UTC (Thu) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
Just wondering. What is Search going to do with data that it can't analyse?
I have a directory tree in my home directory with 16 million map tiles, and lots of other non searchable stuff such as source code. What's it going to do when it see that. Spend days analysing them? Will I be forced to move stuff out of my home directory that isn't searchable? I think there is a big difference between a home directory where I control stuff and the internet where I don't.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 31, 2010 12:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
On the internet, you also don't spend your system's time and disk bandwidth doing the indexing.
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