On my computer at home I am still using Windows XP. I do have a lot of files and sometime last year I realised how difficult is to actually find in a timely manner the file that you are looking for. You know, I am not the best organized person in the world.
I start looking for pieces of software that will improve my file management skills and this is the freeware that I found:
- Folder View is an addon for Windows Explore which adds tab browsing for file management. If tab browsing is cool for the web, it sure must be cool for your own computer. You can define the shortcuts to the folders that you are using most frequently and have those folders in tabs in the Explorer.
- Folder Size is adding a new feature to the Windows Explorer. Now you will be able to have a column in the windows explorer which will display the size of the folder. It helps when you want to know what is eating your hard drive space.
- Copernic Desktop Search is just a very good and unitrusive desktop search engine. Just sits on your taskbar. You have a text box where you can type your search and that’s it. You can forget about google desktop search, or MSN search or the indexing service. After you install and configure Copernic, just give the software enough time to index your hard drive. After a couple of weeks of using the software you will start wondering how did you manage your files before. The beauty is you can save your files wherever you want, as long as the file path is in the index path of Copernic Desktop Search.
I am still looking for an addon that will do labels for the NTFS file system. You know, the NTFS supports a feature called hard link which is something like a shortcut but at a more profound file systems level. And there is a command line utility that creates hard links in Windows XP. Why is this feature not advertised, do not know.
Right now there is only one piece of software that deals with labels for the Windows XP file system. Is from Microsoft Research and is forcing you to install Outlook, .Net framework and Microsoft search engine. The interface is nice and it does the job. But I am not going to install all these just for me to be able to display some labels like in GMail.
There is a shell extension that deals with hard links. It’s called hardlinkshellext (lack of imagination here I presume 
), which does the job very well, but is too complicated to use. It deals with concepts which most of the people will find difficult to understand.
So maybe someone will take this tool or the command line interface tool from Microsoft and simulate labels in windows by creating hard links and symbolic links in a folder which has the label name. The folder is the label. You can create these folders in the profile directory without any issues. I still have to figure out how can you add multiple labels without creating a unique folder for each possible combination of labels. But if is not possible in a better way I still think we should give access to as much as 10-15 user defined labels. Anyway I do not think that a regular user will have more than 10-15 labels. BTW how many labels are you using in GMail?
And please create a nice interface for this. As in instead of “creating hard link”, something like “please add label” . And display the labels on the left as virtual folders, and allow me to select multiple labels.
And if you can integrate this into Copernic Desktop Search I will be very happy.
Is there something similar for Linux? I know of Beagle project but maybe are other things out there which combined will do the trick maybe even better than in Windows.
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