TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I remember looking at this a few years ago. My main reason for not using it was the time it would have taken to tag all my files. Basically, if you have so many files that it's worth tagging them, you need to spend a lot of time tagging, and if you have so few that it's reasonable to tag them all, you don't need this system. If you have a manageable number but expect tagging to be useful in…

I messed with TMSU back one of the previous times it was posted. It's very cool and works well but I just couldn't make myself go retroactively apply tags to terabytes of existing files. It almost feels like a personal categorization version of the "AI Bitter Lesson": people keep thinking that doing a bunch of manual taxonomy work is going to help them find files faster but eventually search catches up

...what's frustrating about the hierarchical nature of filesystems? Literally the only ways I can think of historically is mounts/links; which in the POSIX world have been the source of some gigantic piles of academic salt, but in day-to-day (read: relatively sane operation), I've never encountered a case where one can't speed things up for one self by leveraging said hierarchical structure expressively. In fact, I'd anticipate any type of system that tries to hide paths behind tagging to eventually reduce…