What is your method of "folksonomy" tagging for files on your local machine?

Question

Way back in the days when "delicious" was just "del.icio.us", I had assumed that everyone had finally caught on that Ontology is overrated.

So why am I still having to roll my own tagging system using sqlite and a bunch of ruby scripts in order to address this obvious deficiency on my own local machine? I can tag on-line web links, blog posts, questions on stackoverflow.com, and all kinds of web-centric miscellany, but this very basic concept still seems to be missing (or hideously crippled) in the few operating systems I get to use. Perhaps I am just using the wrong OSs?

From what I've seen out there, the pickins' seem pretty slim.

What do you use?

Answer 1

The BeOS operating system already did this in 1991, before it became fashionable on the web – in fact, the web didn't even exist then. There's several successors, reimplementations and filesystems inspired by the BeFS out there. Some operating systems that include them are magnussoft ZETA (discontinued successor to BeOS, uses the original BeFS), Haiku OS (open source clone of BeOS, formerly known as OpenBeOS, uses an open source reimplementation of BeFS, called OpenBeFS), SkyOS (proprietary commercial BeOS-inspired operating system, using a fork of OpenBeOS) and Syllable (BeOS-inspired open source OS, formerly called AtheOS, using a BeFS-inspired fileystem called AtheOS FS).

Answer 2

Emacs Org Mode: youtube google tech talk

Answer 3

I don't know but I agree. I ended up putting together a MySQL database to handle mine. (mostly for organizing JPEG photos)

Answer 4

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/oyepa/

ugly, but it works....also, there is find;)

Answer 5

I don't use tags, I just don't have the discipline to do it all the time. I find that searching, using a desktop search tool like Copernic Desktop Search, works the best for me.

Answer 6

I find that if I have to enter the data, to find the files then I won't do it. It takes too much time to think of good tags and apply them. I find it much easier to just drop my stuff into a hierarchy I can remember and be done with it. The hierarchy might not be perfect, and it may take slightly longer to find stuff, but it's better than spending tons of time entering tags for every file I create.

Answer 7

There are some partial tagging solutions for GNOME/Nautilus that you might be interested in.

If you install python bindings for Nautilus you can then install the tracker-tags-tab extension which allows you to set tag properties on files of your choice and then have them come up in a search using Tracker.

Have a look at http://svn.gnome.org/svn/tracker/trunk/python/nautilus/ and the python-nautilus package.