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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

What works for me on my computer is put things into general buckets of downloads, things I don't care about, things I need to keep, and programming projects. This really basic organization allows me to be able to delete lots of files without worry while taking almost no time to organize. With search finding things is easy but deleting everything you don't need can still be hard.

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I found it striking how similar the system that I have settled into is to yours, and also the similarity of the benefits that you ascribed to it. I love having my /home/name/tmp folder and being able to delete everything in it without worry when I find it becoming a bit crowded. I find that it takes care of most things I don't need but there are a lot of small projects and downloaded libraries that sit in my programming projects directory that are more difficult to delete. All in all I find the organization very relaxing and passive. Roughly the buckets I have are: - Downloads - Documents - workspace (programming projects) - tmp

The way I do it on both Linux and Windows is: all the downloads go into Downloads folder. I keep the folder sorted by date (newest top) - 90% of the time I'm looking for something recently downloaded, and for the remaining 10%, I usually have an estimate in my head how old the file is, so I can do a visual binary search on the dates quickly. When I need to free up some space on the drive, I resort the folder by size (descending), and start deleting from the largest files down.

And it just occurred to me that along with sort by date (usually modified), we can do sort by accessed date. Which is now what I'm doing with my downloads folder and probably a few more.

Honestly I feel like the downloads folder is something of a waste. Typically the software there is too old by the time I find myself reinstalling.

Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere

Software is only a portion of my Downloads folder. It's usually a random collection of pictures, music files, videos, documents, spreadsheets, archives with data, archives with code, etc.

I also settled into something similar.

I only use 4 main directories. One for code projects, one for design projects, ~/Downloads for transient files, ~/Documents for files that don't belong to an specific project.

Once in a while I create a YYYY-MM-DD folder, drop the current version of each of those folders, and start again with a clean slate. If I need to edit a file, I just search for it and edit it where it is; if I notice I'm having to edit it often, I may bring it back to its previous folder.

If it looks like what a regular user would do, that's exactly why I started doing it. I don't want to care.

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