I find myself having too many nested folders, and I’m just a normie. I wonder how deep they go for you tech people.
At some points, Windows won’t let me change the file name because it was too long and I’m assuming the file path to it plus the ridiculously long name (“person last name, first name - type of document (purpose) yyyymmdd”) just breaks Windows.
Sometimes I have to copy those files to my desktop just to rename the new file, so that I can upload the file to an online system that only lets me upload files with names under 42 characters long. It’s wild.
This was one of the reasons I quit trying to develop on Windows way back when. I had a very well organized system of subfolders for all my code, and it was literally running into some kind of path length limit trying to import deeply nested dependencies in certain projects. This was WELL into the era of 64-bit computing, absolutely no excuse other than Microsoft taking shortcuts.
I still run into this issue when one of my company’s clients requires developing on Windows. Doesn’t take many subfolders before node_modules just starts breaking.
There are lots of reasons I hate developing on windows and that’s certainly one of them.
You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26’000 characters.
Open the Registry Editor.
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
Find the LongPathsEnabled DWORD value, double-click it, and set its value to 1
A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don’t understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can’t add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
Breadbox is for notes that i need to reference or otherwise want quick access to
Data is for everything else
For file navigation, i use links and references within the notes themselves, which creates a network of linked files that is far far easier to navigate than folders
Everything else is sorta all over the place, but in general
~/Documents
dumping ground for important documents, folders are arbitrarily made as I go
~/Downloads
dumping grounds for downloaded things, generally important files are moved elsewhere
~/Code is where i put all of my personal projects and other junk related to programming
My paths are pretty short ngl
/home/user/devel/projects/android/testproject/
Probably is the longest one.
Or maybe even
/home/user/devel/lessons/dotnet-aspnet/exam/AspnetExam/xxxroot/libs/bootstrap-icons/
But that one is temporary, I’ll archive it once it’s done
In my projects folder I have an “all” folder where I store all my projects. But back at the projects folder there are others like “by-client”, " by-language", and “by-date”. When I make a new project I create it inside the all folder, and then place shortcuts inside the corresponding folders.
From Documents > ‘routine documents’ > FY > Month > Section (personnel, operations, or logistics) > and whatever task from there for my main day-to-day stuff
But, for operations outside of the monthly sort, like managing personnel training, it gets really weird;
From Documents > Training > FY > department > categories of training > subcategory > individual person’s folder for the course > application folders with dates (the last folder here is when the one that got approved and they’re going to the school on).
This one is where I end up with file names I can’t rename.
I find myself having too many nested folders, and I’m just a normie. I wonder how deep they go for you tech people.
At some points, Windows won’t let me change the file name because it was too long and I’m assuming the file path to it plus the ridiculously long name (“person last name, first name - type of document (purpose) yyyymmdd”) just breaks Windows.
Sometimes I have to copy those files to my desktop just to rename the new file, so that I can upload the file to an online system that only lets me upload files with names under 42 characters long. It’s wild.
Too deep.
I am having a peoblem bwcause sometimes I broke my own rules or sorted every itme in it’s own folder.
This was one of the reasons I quit trying to develop on Windows way back when. I had a very well organized system of subfolders for all my code, and it was literally running into some kind of path length limit trying to import deeply nested dependencies in certain projects. This was WELL into the era of 64-bit computing, absolutely no excuse other than Microsoft taking shortcuts.
I still run into this issue when one of my company’s clients requires developing on Windows. Doesn’t take many subfolders before
node_modulesjust starts breaking.There are lots of reasons I hate developing on windows and that’s certainly one of them.
You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26’000 characters.
That sounds like something my organization would have restricted access to.
And I guess this isn’t the default for backwards compatibility with 1978’s tech?
A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don’t understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can’t add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
For every other company I would buy that argument. But for one that forces customers to throw away millions of computers which can’t run Win 11… no.
Well son of a bitch, there was a workaround
In my obsidian notes folder, i have
.
For file navigation, i use links and references within the notes themselves, which creates a network of linked files that is far far easier to navigate than folders
Everything else is sorta all over the place, but in general
~/ is the user home directory
For pictures, i use a self hosted Immich instance
My paths are pretty short ngl /home/user/devel/projects/android/testproject/ Probably is the longest one. Or maybe even /home/user/devel/lessons/dotnet-aspnet/exam/AspnetExam/xxxroot/libs/bootstrap-icons/ But that one is temporary, I’ll archive it once it’s done
In my projects folder I have an “all” folder where I store all my projects. But back at the projects folder there are others like “by-client”, " by-language", and “by-date”. When I make a new project I create it inside the all folder, and then place shortcuts inside the corresponding folders.
I do something like:
From Documents > ‘routine documents’ > FY > Month > Section (personnel, operations, or logistics) > and whatever task from there for my main day-to-day stuff
But, for operations outside of the monthly sort, like managing personnel training, it gets really weird;
From Documents > Training > FY > department > categories of training > subcategory > individual person’s folder for the course > application folders with dates (the last folder here is when the one that got approved and they’re going to the school on).
This one is where I end up with file names I can’t rename.