 So over the last week or so, I've been doing a little bit of spring cleaning now. I know what you're thinking Matt. It's October It's not spring. Well You'd be right. It's not spring but I've decided to do a little bit of spring cleaning and the place that I've been focusing on, you know Not in the physical world, but on my computer is in trying to get my files a little bit better Organized I am not the worst when it comes to organizing my files I tried to to keep things in their proper places The pictures go in the pictures folder the downloads go in the downloads folder you get the idea, but After that point usually stuff just kind of gets shoved in there like it's a closet And when you walk in you expect the entire thing to come crumbling down and bury you in detritus But I want to do better. So over the last week or so, I've been trying to organize within those directories a little bit better and Over that time, I've figured out a few things and I thought I'd pass those things along So today I'm gonna talk about three tips or tricks that I can give you for being a little bit better organized when it comes to file management So the first one is that directories are your friend use as many directories that you possibly can and I'm Serious about this when I say everything should go in a directory Even if you know that there's only one thing that could possibly go in that directory create a directory for it So let me show you a good example of this. This is my Wallpapers folder and as you can see I have Categories of wallpapers now. I'm obviously just getting started here. There's still a long way to go But by creating categories of wallpapers I've been able to become a little bit more organized with the way things are so anything It's abstract goes in the abstract folder That's not a good title because a lot of things could be considered quote-unquote abstract so it's become kind of a catch-all for weird things anything that is kind of Weird goes in here. It's not necessarily the best categorization, but I'm working on it buildings and stuff going here now As you can see I've started to put directories inside of directories. So Instead of the architecture directory, I have a castles directory, you know for castles, you know And I'm working on this slowly putting things where they're supposed to go And even if I knew I only had one wallpaper of a certain category. I'd still create a directory for it I would not leave it just lying about in the general wallpapers folder and this tip goes for pretty much anything It's not just pictures documents any of that stuff create a directory for Everything and then nest those directories in the appropriate place create a hierarchy of Directories so you have a very general category of something and then you put more specific directories inside there and then the files the reason why you do this is For two reasons first it looks better and that really doesn't matter all that much But for me personally it just kind of feels more like you're flowing through your file system when you've organized like this But also by having Appropriate names for your directories and storing things in the proper places It just makes it not only easier to find manually, but also easier to search So if you need to search for something if you have something properly labeled Inside of its own directory. It just makes it much easier to find once you've done your organizing So those are the two reasons why this is really important And I'm sure there are probably other ones that I'm not thinking of The second tip that I can give you and this is the one that I haven't even started on yet And you can see the problem right here on screen. I need to do a better job of naming My files appropriately now most of these are not my fault. I've downloaded these off from various Places on the internet from wallpaper packs and wallpaper websites and stuff like that And they all have different naming conventions and all this stuff Some of the stuff even came from my Google images, you know, and you can't get a proper name off from Google images So if I were to look at number 44 here, I have no idea what I'd name that but the idea behind the second tip is to make sure that every file that you have is appropriately named and The benefits for this are pretty obvious It means that when you want to search for something you can search for it And you won't have to worry about it having a name that has nothing to do with what the actual thing is Also, if you don't have a fancy Preview you can at least be able to tell what that file is without having to actually open it up and look at it This is Really good for saving time and being able to just kind of glance. Oh, like, oh, I know what 191 is that's a couch Of all the things that could click on it happens to be a sofa. That is a really weird wallpaper I don't know why I have it, but it doesn't matter you get the idea I would name that one sofa. So if I were to rename that I would name this Sofa, you know, I mean then now I have a properly named file that I can search for the next time I want a wallpaper of a, you know, a sofa really weird. I don't That kind of worked out better if I you know tried anyways name your files appropriately now Obviously, this is way easier to do as you collect your file. So when you download something name it appropriately It's much harder to do as I'm gonna have to be have to do and go through these one by one after I've downloaded them and rename them It's much easier to do it as you download or as you collect your files I'm pretty sure at most everybody's going to be exactly like me and that they probably have a whole bunch of files where they Haven't done this so they're gonna have to go back and do them But if you can at least start yourself on the habit of naming your stuff appropriately when you Download it or pull it from somewhere or upload it to your computer or whatever You'll at least be on your way to having this done for you You won't have to do it again in the future long as you always make a habit of doing this The third one on the list is one that I consider fairly obvious And that is to delete as much of the stuff out of your downloads folder as possible This is not one that I do a very good job at but I've been working on it Believe it or not my downloads folder was much bigger than this just a few days ago I've gotten it down to quite a bit and there's actually quite a few more of these backups here that I could get rid of I just haven't gotten around to it yet But the point is is that your downloads folder is probably the directory on your system That is the most likely to become cluttered because that's where the catch all is every time you download a picture or whatever from the internet It's probably going in your downloads folder. So just From time to time go into your downloads folder and delete the things that you just know you no longer need There are some things here that I know I no longer need. So for example, I can get rid of ferdym. I don't use ferdym anymore I can do that Like so I can get rid of the key the keytron one You just go through and delete things that you don't need and one Other way that you can kind of prevent your downloads folder From becoming a catch all is that when you download something from your browser or wherever Put it in the appropriate spot to begin with don't let your downloads folder just become the de facto Place where stuff is downloaded instead if you download a picture Put it in your pictures directory or even better put it in the directory inside of the picture directory where it goes specifically categorized for whatever that picture is you could do the same thing for applications or binaries or app images that you downloaded from the internet Put those in the appropriate place where you want to store them right away instead of just having the downloads folder Be your automatic catch all for everything now. This is one habit that i'm really really bad at I do a pretty good job when it comes to pictures I can store those where they go and i've become a much better job But specifically when it comes to wallpapers downloading those and putting those where they go Even if i still need to learn how to Name them properly One thing i haven't done a very good job of that is everything else So videos that i download rpms zip folders all this stuff it tends to kind of accumulate in the downloads folder and that is Not something that i have been able to break my habit of so far So it's something that i'm definitely working on hopefully that's something that i get better at So those are the three tips that i've kind of discovered at least about my personal way of organizing stuff when it comes to Spring cleaning I'm sure there are many more that i could share But those are the three that i've kind of thought about over the last few days If you have ideas on how you organize your file system I'd love to hear of those in the comment section below You can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time