Feature: Add comments to folders (discussion)

[cloopadoop]

What feature or improvement do you think would benefit Files?

I have been thinking about writing a software that would let me "annotate" my folders in Windows. Maybe it means when you hover over a folder, the tooltip shows what you've written. Or maybe it's a (hidden) markdown file like README.MD is for GitHub that autorenders in the details pane. If searchable, all the better. I could say "This folder is a legacy folder and can be ignored" or "This is a monorepo and must be initialized properly on other machines when cloned"

Secondly, I have recently restructured some folders so that all my GitHub repos are now within project folders they are associated with rather than dumped all together in one Repositories folder. This change has pros and cons, but I would love for folders detected to have .git in them to optionally be displayed as Repository folders with a special icon. And that made me think: What about all sorts of folder iconography schema that can be autoapplied? Maybe you can associate a specific tag with a folder icon or automation rule. I know you can change icons manually, but I can already do that in plain old Windows Explorer.

This leads me to just thinking an overall folder metadata/customization feature would be great. Something I like about how Google Drive manages files is that it keeps track of files and folders as guids and then puts shortcuts to them everywhere rather than duplicating data when things move around. This is great because regardless of where things get moved to, you can attach them to specific records in various systems. If you bork your GDrive folder structure? Doesn't matter. Anything that referenced that file/folder still has access to it by ID. It works great in a web browser, less so on a hard drive. If folders are identifiable by ID and settings, could recreate that flexibility.

Companies would love it. Their on-prem shared drives could basically organize themselves like OneDrive or Google Drive and they could leave notes (along with the already built-in function of tagging that they could use for project names or whatever).

Requirements

Alright I went a little overboard with those ideas but the gist of the request:

1. Allow folder icon change automation rules
2. Allow more metadata than tags to be stored with a folder, such as markdown descriptions

• This proposal will improve readability of folder structure by allowing searchable annotations for what a project is as well as custom icons

Files Version

3.6.0.0

Windows Version

10.0.22631.4037

Comments

Love the app, it's so good. :)

[yaira2]

Allow folder icon change automation rules

This is beyond the scope of Files, but it definitely sounds like a good idea for an automation tool, and would nicely compliment the features in Files.

Allow more metadata than tags to be stored with a folder, such as markdown descriptions

This is an interesting idea, but I wonder, what if, instead of adding a separate feature, you could assign descriptions to tags? Then, when you hover over a tag, the description shows in a tooltip. What do you think?

[cloopadoop]

That is a good idea and seems like it might be not too tricky, but what I am thinking of annotations for is more ad hoc per individual folder, which would mean creating a new tag for each folder. Tagging is for grouping, where I think annotation is per-entity level detail, in the way I'm imagining it. A very visible set of directions for what goes in what folders would help so many people who share filespaces and have trouble with where things go.