[UFO Chicago] alternative ways of locating files

[Jordan Bettis]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 05:45:16AM -0600, Brian Sobolak wrote:
> 
> On Wed, February 3, 2010 12:24 am, Jordan Bettis wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 09:07:21PM -0600, Brian Sobolak wrote:
> >>
> >> I've found that I have various techniques for reasonably organizing my
> >> files so that I can quickly find what I need.  But sometimes I forget,
> >> especially for older things.
> >>
> >> Usually though I can remember this either by location or *when* I worked
> >> on it.  Yet short of using `find` and searching, I wonder if there is
> >> tool
> >> that organizes your filesystem into a view sorted by last modified time?
> >
> > You can do 'find . -mtime 1 -mtime +5'
> 
> True, but it's rarely something I worked on in the last five days that is
> the issue.  it's more like 200 days ago.

That was just an example, of course, you can use whatever range you want.

You might also want to consider running a finder service like
MetaTracker or Recall.

> I looked last night at some of the pieces for OLPC.  It looks like it
> would do what I'm looking for, but works at a pretty low-level and not as
> a stand-alone app.

Yeah I tried installing Sugar too a while back. The problem is that
Sugar isn't supposed to be a few components with well-defined
requirements that integrate into existing infrastructure.

Finally Being The Ones who make filesystems relational was a very
small part of their overarching five-year plan to Completely Change
Everything about Computing and Education and Geopolitics and Life and
the essential structure of the Universe while spreading magic pixie
dust o'er the land, giving everyone a free Unicorn and providing
Negroponte with an unlimited number of hob-nobbing opportunities.

So Sugar hasn't produced many well-componentized utilities. But
perhaps somebody will pick through the carcass someday and extract
something useful.

That said, if you intend to maintain a relational tag library, Neil's
suggestion of using symlinks might be a good one. Make each tag its
own subdirectory like so:

~brian/tags/blog-ideas/
~brian/tags/attempts-to-use-sugar/
~brian/tags/references-superman-iii/
etc

> It continues to amaze me that there are more nuanced tools for finding
> files besides navigating a file tree.  When you look at people's
> computers, and how much frustration it causes for most, it surprises me
> that more isn't done.  I often think people email files in corporations
> just so they can find them later.

I really think one of those finder services are what you need. 

-- 
Jordan Bettis