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Ask HN: Organizing and Searching Personal Documents
9 points by ystad on May 31, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
I have my documents (pdfs, text files, source code, markdown, google docs etc.) strewn across local drives, Google drive and GitHub.

I struggle to search for my pdfs, Google docs and sometimes source code (although grep works decent)

What do you use to help organize and search your personal content?



A few approaches combined make for a very "shallow" search whenever I need something

- Johnny Decimal (https://johnnydecimal.com/) to structure folders

- agkozak/zsh-z: Jump quickly to directories that you have visited "frecently." A native Zsh port of z.sh with added features. (https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z)

- catfish for searching (https://docs.xfce.org/apps/catfish/start)

The 2nd and 3rd component have many alternatives across platforms.


Alfred/Spotlight on macOS.

Albert and GNOME Search or whatever, on Linux.

Windows Search on Windows. (Windows Search doesn't work very well for me, but it's something.)

https://www.alfredapp.com/

https://albertlauncher.github.io/

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/files-search....


On Windows I use:

- Voidtools Everything for search by name/metadata.

- DocFetcher (open-source version) for search by file contents.

Everything is excellent, but DocFetcher could be improved.


“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” – Tom Bodett


I use directories to organize my files.




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