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Comment by funthree | Hacker News Reader

This seems the most intuitive. You could have some flattened view of a folder where it shows everything with tags, or you could navigate by folders. So if you have two folders and two subfolders by the same name, with the flattened view you can see all of the similar items. However, doing away with hierarchical folder structure is a bad idea.

    > module-1
        > views
        > other-thing
             > views
    > module-2
        > views
    > module-3
        > views

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Eventually users might get to the point that the hierarchy is unnecessary. Surely it's more efficient to type out "2012, foo, xyz corp, alpha". And it's certainly easier to type out a few tags than navigate a few trees to do a search.

But people have stubbornly resisted that for so long, I wouldn't hold my breath. [1]

[1] It seems just about every document management system since the 90s was designed under the "search, don't scan!" assumption, stubbornly clinging to theoretical efficiency and then grumpily (and often painfully) adding back in 'artificial' folder structures built from the tags for both file->open and file->save UI.

Not necessarily. The biggest problem I've had with tags is consistency. When I'm tagging photos of my kids, every time I have to remember "did I tag these with kids, rebecca, becky, daughter, or children?" It gets tedious. Sure, you can maintain a list of commonly-used tags, but that list often changes on a per workflow basis. Folders give you the benefits of tags with a hierarchy and smaller search space. When I open my work folder, I see a list of each of my projects. From there, I can go into that project, and see directories that are specific to that project. In a tag-based system, I have to remember all of the requisite tags from the beginning, or I have to go through an iterative process adding tags, seeing if I got the right one, and if so, then looking at the new list of suggested tags. Folders let the computer remember how things are organized and lets the human select from that organization.

Also, this article gets the details wrong. For example, you certainly can nest folders in the real world. Take a personnel file cabinet, with a 2012 drawer, with a hang folder for each employee that contains a manila folder labeled timecards. That's 4 levels of nesting and it works fine.

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