With Windows ending support for Windows 10 in a few months I was able to convince a family member to install Linux on a spare computer he has. His Windows machine is almost unusably slow. The idea is that instead of a hard introduction to Linux he's able to play around with it before Windows pulls the rug on him. He's also absolutely pissed that OneDrive basically stole all of his files without permission.

So he is completely down to use Linux. Very motivated. But solving the tiny gaps is the name of the game. I've learned long ago to stop introducing people to LibreOffice. It's bad. I don't use it, I use a terminal, and so how can I tell people a software is good when it isn't. Instead I have a better solution. It's called OnlyOffice. It's a 0.998:1 recreation of MS Office. Most people wouldn't even realize they aren't using standard office.

So this is great and almost everything is going well. Except for the dumbest hang up.

Windows has made it so this person has no idea what their file structure is on Windows. Windows really disincentivizes you to browse your folders because of how strange it is, and by using psuedo folders that don't have real paths that it presents as the default. So a lot of Windows users have no sense of location.

And one of the very few differences between OnlyOffice and MS Office come into play. For them to get a file they would open up the application first and then find the file. And because Excel and Word are different applications that means that when locating a file they only see relevant data. But OnlyOffice is just one application. So when you open files from it you are looking at all files by default.

With their flat file management, lacking project folders, it's just a critical mass they haven't hit before. They are now looking at 2x the files they were before at once. Excel and Word. Oh my! But it does cross the "well this is a complete mess" threshold.

Now an obvious solution is obvious. Project folders. You shouldn't have naked files anyway. But their concern is OMG I'll have so many folders. Yeah, but fewer folder than they currently have files at that level, and each folder with 6-10 items in it. They can't envision a folder than has any less than 100 files in it and they don't want a 100 folders each with 100 files. That wouldn't happen but that's what they fear regardless. So they want all files flat and to only see the files they want to see at a given moment.

And it got me thinking. What if there was something softer than a directory that lets people have flat files but also narrow what they are looking for with really good UI and people can start a process of organizing without risk of damaging their current organization. Well it already exists as a concept. It's called tags. It's what Haiku and Plan9 were about. That way there can be a soft progress towards getting these files sorted into projects.

Now I'm just struggling to find the right explorer for that. Surely there has to be greater than zero softwares written in the Linux world for that. The only one I did find was called TagSpaces. Oh no. It's not what I'm looking for. It tries to completely replace everything as a "holistic workflow solution". It tries to open documents itself, poorly, and locks basic things behind a pro plan like viewing files ordered by date modified. Fuck that entirely.

Surely someone has created something that works 90% like MS file explorer / thunar / nautilus, but with a tag library, and an auto tag added for the extension. Such an obvious idea.