Tired of having folders on folders on folders? Wish there was a way to search for your stuff without such a limiting tree structure? Need a better way to organize your documents? Images? Videos? Music? Who cares?! Sort 'em all!
With the help of yx, you can tag your files with your own... tags(?) and find them more easily! This lightweight program holds its entire state in a .yx_index file, which you can put in any folder or parent folder where you would like to use the program. You can make multiple .yx_index files, for separate libraries, or put one in a higher level directory to use yx anywhere. When you want to access your files, you can search for them using yx list by or apply more complicated searches using yx constraint. However, if you'd like to use your OS's file search (pretty overlooked feature, check out the link at the bottom of this file), you can also use yx render named to create a folder of hard links renamed to the original files. This way, you can name your files whatever you want, and still be able to search for them via tags in the search bar!
| THIS APP IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS. |
|---|
Some of the features mentioned here aren't implemented yet.
(...but they will be soon!)
This tutorial assumes you're using Windows, but it should work fine on Linux or macOS if you replace the Windows-specific things, like backslashes in paths being replaced with slashes.
First, cd into the folder you would like to host your index
file in. For this example, we'll be trying out the program in
a folder called stuff-to-tag in the Documents folder. Then,
run the init command:
yx create
If you would rather not, for some reason, you could always just specify an absolute or relative path in the command itself, like this:
yx create C:\Users\sheep\Documents\stuff-to-tag
Now, you'll need to add in some of your own tags.
yx add fireflies.txt music song-lyrics
yx add amogus-meme.png meme sus
yx add amogus-drip.mp3 music meme sus
Clearly, these 3 files have at least some characteristics in common! However, normally, you wouldn't be able to group these 3 files properly. You could try putting the 2 memes together, but then the text file would have to go somewhere else. You could put the 2 music-related files together, but then the image would need a different location as well.
You can decide any file structure that seems right to you, but there will always be a different way to group the files that you might want to see. For those cases, you are now able to search for such desired files using the yx command.
Let's say you have the files sorted like this:
stuff-to-tag (folder)
| - memes (folder)
| | - amogus-meme.png
| | - amogus-drip.mp3
|
| - .yx_index
| - fireflies.txt
You want to find all music-related files, but you'd have to go searching through all your stuff! Luckily, we already have a couple tags set up.
From the folder .yx_index is in (or any subfolder from there), run this command to add a command constraint:
yx constraint tag music
There are lots of constraints to use for more fine-grained control.
Cool! Now any yx commands we run using this index file will only apply to files tagged as music. Let's check out our files.
yx render
Without any options, the render subcommand creates a folder called yx-out in the same folder, and creates some hard-links to every matching file in the index. However, since we put a constraint before running the command, it only created links to our files with the tag music. Nice!
Now, you probably don't want to limit yourself to these 2 files forever... Let's free the program from our previous constraints.
yx free
And now, we're back to where we started! Now, go check out your files!