All safely filed away
12 years ago I trained as a music studio engineer and worked exclusively on a Mac. That was the only time I have ever used a Mac and I imagine they’re very different these days. This post really isn’t about Macs but it is about something I remember liking on the Macs I used.
There was a simple feature, that may well still exist on Macs today, and that was the ability to colour folders on the desktop or in the file manager. I was thinking about this recently and it got me on to a whole load of little additions I would like to see in a file manager.
Files are most often arranged in trees using directories and sub-directories for organisation but I often find it annoying when either things have to be deeply nested within the file tree so that they are in their relevant sub-directory or they end up mixed up all together in one big directory. Neither is very helpful and neither are the usual display options. The ability to order things by type, date and position in the alphabet are ok but inflexible.
What I would like is the ability to define groups within a directory and assign files to a group. Groups could have a colour assigned to them so that it is easy to see which group a file or directory is in. You could then order files by group and see files/directories at a glance without having to navigate into different directories to see all the files.
As an addition to this I would like to divide a file manager window up into group areas so that I could easily drag and drop files into groups ( this would also work for cut, copy and paste). If I could then order files within the group by time, date or name that would be really useful.
Whilst we’re adding information to files (the group name) then we may as well add other metadata too that can be displayed in the file manager as necessary. It would often be handy to be able to add descriptions, notes or a revision number to a file. Maybe a warning feature would be useful whereby a warning dialogue box would pop up if a file or directory was accessed.
I’m sure that there are many more ideas that could be incorporated too. The easier it is to handle and understand large amounts of data the better in my book and it would certainly stop me have files dotted around my drive in a disorganised mess like I do now. If these features exist in any form in any current file managers it would be nice to know and if not it would be nice if someone tried to add them.
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