I’ve developed a nice little way to manage my work in progress folders.
I keep a bunch of folders around where I can stick things that are in-flight: one for home projects, one for blogs, etc. I like accumulating ideas in there, one idea per file, that I can come back to and fuss over until something is ready.
The folder is flypaper for ideas and notes. My blog folder has about twenty files right now.
Using “ls”, and relying on file and directory modification times, is a useful way to keep track of all these files. Here’s how.
As projects are finished I move them into a “done” folder. This gets them out of the way. A useful side effect is the modification time of the done directly itself gets updated.
The in-flight projects I care about most are the ones most recently updated: as an idea gets older it becomes less and less interesting. When looking at this directory I use the “ls -ltr” command. ”l” means long (so you can see dates), “t” means sort by modification time, and “r” reverses that sort, so you see latest modified on the bottom.
The old files are at the top where I don’t worry about them. Some even scroll off the top of the screen, that’s fine. The done folder is a nice visual line for when something was last completed (say, published). Having a separate color for directories makes this visually apparent. And the bottom of the list are those most recently modified. Generally I work on the bottom up. Sometimes I go back to an old idea and add some notes. That bumps it to the top of the line — it is interesting again.
I probably type “ls -ltr” at least 5 times an hour. I’ve never aliased it since my muscle memory is so strong (but maybe I still should).
Nice one. I have been using a similar methodology for over 15 years, with additional feature that the directory and its contents are checked into a CVS repository, allowing me to synchronize everything on all my systems. I’ve also had ‘lt’ aliased to ‘ls -lrt’ for the couple of decades.
I’ve been using this command ever since I started using Unix. I cannot imagine not using it all the time.
I have it aliased to ‘lt’. Just in case ..
make it into an alias. alias lt=’ls -ltr’
“ls -ltrh” is one my favorite commands, too.
You could alias it to “l” if you don’t already have that taken.
Best,
Aleksey
OK, OK everyone, I got off my duff and aliased:
https://github.com/sefk/sef-dotfiles/commit/3b9cdcc74abc4183bf159867d3a7b5a6a3158ad7
You should alias it to ‘l’ or something simple, saves time and keyboard resources!
Cooll, I never had used this, Greatttttt… Thankssss!!
Don’t forget to add an ‘h’ as well, to get human-readable file sizes
alias todo=’ls -ltr’
nice article!
Thanks!
I use `ls -ltr` all the time too (its handy for figuring out which files changed in /etc during an update, and lots of other cases). I highly recommend the alias ‘lsd’ (LS-by-Date).
Ha. And apparently a lot of the new-ideas files start out their lives via “touch”?
In other news, what you’re doing here is basically how I use Evernote — I guess you were serious about staying away from that. Directories full of text files have many nice properties, to be sure. But for me, transparent sync to my phone trumps them in this case.
The folder is indeed backed by Dropbox, but you’re right, not editable on the iphone. And that sure would be nice.
I did try Plaintext for a while. That’s an iphone app for a while for editing text files in the cloud (g docs or dropbox). But it caused data loss so I stopped using. Looked and smelled like one vs. two byte character problems, not sure.
I like this idea very much, especially putting ideas down via touch as a reminder to yourself to flesh them out later. But I think I’m still with Matt here on Evernote being a better mechanism. Evernote would also make these searchable on any internet-connected device in the world, not limiting you to a machine that has grep. =:)
Hi Sef, nice blog! ls -alrt is my default ‘ls’…..
Funny how everyone has their favorite idiom for this. Good to hear from you Dave, hope all is well.
I totally respect the elegant approach of the files in directories, but I feel like nvALT might also be up your alley, Sef
http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/