> I'd only have search - so it better be trustworthy
Absolutely agreed. It should be as reliable and as immediate as what we have now.
> I at least have the file tree
I don't know how this would work in practice, but I'm imagining something where, UX-wise, a tag-based FS could act very much like what we're already used to. Google was very much on this track in their early versions of "labels" in gmail and google drive (shame they've slowly moved away from it)
Just last night I used some desktop app I found to tag a few thousand scanned documents so I could do my taxes this morning (researching my options is how I ended up finding this article). Once they were all tagged, I was able to traverse in a very familiar way.
At "root", there's too much noise, but as soon as I pick a tag, say "2017" - now I have whittled down my available tags. And then I pick "receipts". Smaller list of files and a smaller list of tags. And then "restaurants". And then "business".
That seems quite a bit like a hierarchy to me. The subset of tags that are related to the first one I chose act just like sub-directories. The UI could work exactly like what we already know and love. As we know it now, I would have ended up at ./2017/receipts/restaurants/business.
Of course with directories, that's the only way I could organize my files. But if we're working with tags, I would get the exact same results going to:
/business/receipts/2017/restaurants/
/receipts/2017/business/restaurants/
You get the idea. But, I could also potentially do something like:
/receipts/2017/client_1+client_2+client_5
or
/2017/receipts/business+!client_3
Now, still within the realm of a directory structure - even using terminal commands we're all familiar with and a bit of extra sugar - I have access to more features. I can't merge directories in a tree. Not that easily, anyway. But in this case I can `cd` into a directory of exactly what I want in a familiar way without trying to remember if what I'm looking for is in ~/Dropbox/receipts/2017 or ~/Documents/business/client_1/receipts.
It's in both. "Dropbox" and "Documents" are no longer necessary. Nor is ~/.
I like the content of your answer: filtering by tags to narrow down the search results, only showing tags that belong to the current set of results, the benefits of order-insensitive path parts, and the ease of taking unions of tag results.
The path examples that you created are Boolean queries with different symbols: slash means AND (low precedence), plus means OR (medium precedence), and exclamation means NOT (high precedence). Your last example could be rendered as "2017 AND receipts AND (business OR NOT client_3)" and mean the same thing.
In any case, the illustration you made is indeed the sort of user interaction that I want to design into a future prototype.
Absolutely agreed. It should be as reliable and as immediate as what we have now.
> I at least have the file tree
I don't know how this would work in practice, but I'm imagining something where, UX-wise, a tag-based FS could act very much like what we're already used to. Google was very much on this track in their early versions of "labels" in gmail and google drive (shame they've slowly moved away from it)
Just last night I used some desktop app I found to tag a few thousand scanned documents so I could do my taxes this morning (researching my options is how I ended up finding this article). Once they were all tagged, I was able to traverse in a very familiar way.
At "root", there's too much noise, but as soon as I pick a tag, say "2017" - now I have whittled down my available tags. And then I pick "receipts". Smaller list of files and a smaller list of tags. And then "restaurants". And then "business".
That seems quite a bit like a hierarchy to me. The subset of tags that are related to the first one I chose act just like sub-directories. The UI could work exactly like what we already know and love. As we know it now, I would have ended up at ./2017/receipts/restaurants/business.
Of course with directories, that's the only way I could organize my files. But if we're working with tags, I would get the exact same results going to:
/business/receipts/2017/restaurants/
/receipts/2017/business/restaurants/
You get the idea. But, I could also potentially do something like:
/receipts/2017/client_1+client_2+client_5
or
/2017/receipts/business+!client_3
Now, still within the realm of a directory structure - even using terminal commands we're all familiar with and a bit of extra sugar - I have access to more features. I can't merge directories in a tree. Not that easily, anyway. But in this case I can `cd` into a directory of exactly what I want in a familiar way without trying to remember if what I'm looking for is in ~/Dropbox/receipts/2017 or ~/Documents/business/client_1/receipts.
It's in both. "Dropbox" and "Documents" are no longer necessary. Nor is ~/.