20220209-desktop_tidiness.txt
Today I was thinking about an old article I read about desktop horror
stories: the screenshots of people who let their desktop become a
dumping ground for a ll sorts of files. It's a small wonder that many
of these people also were bad about naming their files well, which
made me think about my own organization as well.

When I was using Windows daily in my personal life as a teen/adult, I
had a typical semi-ordered file org that got more meticulous as I got
older, I believe . Although even in middle school I was separating
files into folders by year and school subject, so maybe I wasn't that
common. I do remember having spaces and capitals and even punctuation
in my filenames (other than - and _). I think I briefly used camelCase
or CamelCase for filenames. But later on I settled on file_name.typ or
author-file_name.typ or some logical variation (for video files I use
title_of_movie-videobitrate.typ).

But anyway, even from a young age with Macs I knew the value of a good
folder system. My dad, unfortunately, didn't really follow through. I
guess he had a strong naming system, but he put seemingly everything
on the desktop. I saw this the few times I was on his work computer
and was a bit shocked by the clutt er. He was very different from me,
but then again, most of the computers he worked on barely had a
browsable filesystem or were just ls or dir listings. Whe n I was
trying a new organization scheme, I looked up how to create a script
to move these molehill mountains of files into an easier arrangement.
I found a batch script author who described "flattening" a folder
hierarchy in Windows. I was impressed and it further pushed me along
to use more and more cmd tools rather than GUI alternatives.
 
Towards the end of my Windows use life, I had a batch script that
organized my files based on either file category, first character, or
extension. It helped declutter a lot of folders, especially those with
hundreds of files in them. I had also by this point used the Bulk
Rename Utility (very handy) to fix all my poorly-constructed
filenames. When I moved over to Linux Mint, I initially used bash and
converted my org batch script into bash. It was pretty simple. I t has
evolved into having options to organize my most-used folders (home,
downloads, professional) with a couple different options depending on
the folder. I would not want to wait for even ls to read every mkv
file I have in my mkv folder without even more division. Usually it's
extension first and, if needed, alphabetical files. It makes things so
easy to find, even if sometimes I have to go through a couple more
folders than I'd like (seriously, I rarely delve more than 3-4 folders
deep from the organizational root, be it /mnt/storage or /home/user).

The most disorganization I have now is from classifying files via
filename: I'll have files labeled "guide-dwm.txt" or "tips-dwm.txt" or
stuff like that. I haven't really gone further than that as the
situations are few and far between that I actually have trouble
finding a file. In fact, the most common occasi on that happens is
when the file isn't on that same drive.

As for my desktop, I don't really have one anymore. I use dwm but
seeing as I hardly ever look at my desktop background and how dmenu
makes the desktop icon s pretty useless (does dwm even allow icons?),
I don't really have anything on my desktop. I do sometimes log into
Xfce and it looks like all my ~ folder st uff is in there, so I guess
it's probably a little messy just based on how many configs and
extension folders I have in there. But yeah, with a tiling windo w
manager, I really just don't use the desktop.

To date, my dad's desktop has been the most cluttered I've seen. I
suppose my mom has a similar disinterest in file organization, but she
uses much fewer fi les. Her avalanche of notifications on her phone
are much more alarming to me.