Bitching about File Managers

Color tagging the text

So we are somewhat-closer to mid-21st-century. And I feel like we never left the stone age as far as even simple tools go.

I will elaborate. Back in pre-OSX days I was used to the Mac file manager, which let me change the color of the filename in file list mode. I loved it and used it all the time. They removed that feature, and today, there is no operating system or application that supports it. Is it that much to ask for? It is actually incredibly useful -- mark a file red, and it pops out in a long list...

You can use emblems in some applications, but that is so much less useful. And even if you decide to create a tiny red box to go in front of a file to mark it, it takes a ridiculous number of clicks to set it up. It was so much easier to right-click and pull down to a color. Bah.

Deduplication, backup

So over the years I accumulated a box of drives with semi-unimportant files and folders, and a handful of irreplaceable ones -- photos, etc, as well as some records that need to be kept safe...

As time went on, I gave up on sorting carefully, and deduplicating -- because it's fucking hard without good tools. And now I have a box of drives with nearly-identical folders. Except some drives are missing some things, and others, have a few extras.

Like that XKCD comic about standards.

Worse yet, I've used a variety of ways to copy -- straight up cp, file managers, rsync, etc. And in some cases, the copy failed -- due to bad sectors, my idiocy, I don't know. I just know that I have a bunch of photo files that are 0 length, and a bunch that have partial images. And that makes me even more afraid of touching anything and getting rid of old drives -- at least now I have a bunch of imperfect copies, instead of an authoritative drive with bad files.

And even worse, the drives are dying one by one.

I also have some tape backups. I don't think I could build another system with an optical interface to the tape drive I bought on EBAY should my current system fail. I must've been some kind of genius a few years ago. I can't even imagine taking on that task without my eyeballs peeling and my brain melting. Come to think of it, I can't even remember how to backup or restore -- I have a vague memory of making a fairly complicated script that pipes all kinds of crap into the drive. Hopefully I took some notes about how to start up the drive interface.

Why, waitress, why?

Why isn't there a simple file manager (not written in Python, for ****s sakes), which flags duplicates, allows filenames to be colorcoded, and assists with backing up and checksums/hashes? Maybe with a simple option to keep a mirror on a different disk?

Why hasn't anyone done that? I have an assortment of tools that sort of do various parts, but there is no way to put them together easily. Maybe I can script some tasks -- deduplication, backup, but why can't I do that interactively in a damn file manager -- the only reason I have a mouse?

Do I have to write everything?

Nov 08 · 5 weeks ago · 👍 freezr, bsj38381

9 Comments ↓

I failed various methods, I have ZFS but I am not even able to send, receive and restore snapshots or backup... But the point is at a certain point I need to train my kids on how to use it... And I don't believe that any fancy or pro method will be easy to learn if they aren't nerds. At a certain point I have to print all the photos my wife shooted and store them somewhere like my parents and grand parents pictures...

I usually save photos and stuff I want to keep in my TB hard drive (It's originally used to archive my art from 2012-2014 and so on.)

Hard drives have a 5-year life expectancy at this point. Possibly shorter if files are not re-written. Consequence of denser and denser drives with overlapping bits...

The last time I tried to use ZFS snapshots I lost a bunch of data. Never again.

Sorry, I meant an external hard drive, but I still get what you're saying. I'm sorry you also lost your data as well.

one of my problems with file sorting is by which criteria to sort?

books, movies, audios: by language? by author? by country? by genre?

i have been written this program, currently called etiquette, it uses linux xattrs to tag files. it stores tags inside xattrs.

and tags can have namespaces.

let's say:

director: john smith

actor: john smith

if you search by first it won't bring the other.

but linux file systems can't query. so i need to search inside the directory.

i can add recursive search by tags in subdirectories.

for now i am trying to put all movies in one dir and tag files and search by tags.

btw i also tried: my tags are preserved if i copy to nfs drive.

why did i use xattrs? because i did not want to have file manager specific db. and i wanted to be able to copy files with any tools, any file managers.

so when i read you, i thought: can i color files by vt100 escape codes? i tcied once it didn't work in phone terminal, but i'll try on a computer.

in oric atmos and spectrum if a string contained escape characters you could colour yarts of it as you wish.

or maybe i can store colour as tag in xattrs.

then, which features do you want to have in such a graphical file manager?

do you want it to be tabbed like nc/mc or as windows explorer?

maybe one day i'll write gui file manager hhat works with my tags in ext attrs.

if i do that i won't use python, but pascal.

my tags can work on freebsd and macos too, i need to link/wrap my xattrs.Mod to their api as well.

Most modern filesystems support xattr or similar metadata streams or name -value dbs in files...

Years ago I wrote a Common Lisp file manager that used these to store color, but got stuck in buggy gtk bindings. I wound up writing a ton of my own bindings, then a binding extractor/generator, then gtk4 came out and I ran out of steam...

However, now I am less interested in sorting directories by type, rather in maintenance of very similar backups and integrity.

I think I want to generate hashes into a per-directory file, and use it for verification, deduplication and further operations. Some maybe with specialized guis.

A single, generated once (or upon major change), readable file containing pairs of name hashes and content hashes seems ideal. I can then build tools to dedup, compare, search for anomalies, incrementally back up, etc.

Maybe I could use xattr to keep color and make a specialized ls to show it, I guess. I would really want it in a file manager, but today's fms are enormous and hacking in color seems not worth the effort...

But I could probably make a simple one more easily in C or D these days