Wilfred Hughes points us to this interesting paper on tag-based file systems. The idea is that rather than storing files in the traditional hierarchical manner, they are stored and retrieved by tags. The idea of tags is quite general and can even include key word searches. If you’re like me, the idea of doing away with hierarchical file systems is unnerving. Still, I find that a great deal of my workflow amounts to exactly that through my use of Org mode.
I file notes, links, and other information in a handful of files and retrieve that data via tags. Org mode makes this easy and natural and I can even do regular expression searches through the same Org mode interface. I’ve become very interested in this approach after hearing and reading about Karl Voit’s work on Memacs.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, Voit has a research implementation that you can try out. He also has some interesting papers on the system and related ideas. On a smaller scale, there’s Memacs. If you’re on Linux, it looks to be pretty easy to get it going. If, like me, you’re on OS X, it’s going to take more work but looks doable. I’m slowly implementing much of the same capabilities and will probably steal and adapt some of his scrips as I add more data gathering functionality.