Re: Q about Making Subfolders in the Applications Folder

Mirsky <mirsky@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

However, the reason I am asking for advice is that the computer
programmer at my current job told me to never make sub-folders in the
Applications folder. When I told him how i organized my applications, he
made a face and told me never to play around with the applications
folder in that way. I told him I hadn't had any problems from
organizing my apps in subfolders and he said I've simply been lucky. So
my question: is he right? Am I creating problems for myself by
organizing my apps in subfolders?

Here is a tip to let your programmer fellow stop grinding and allow
you to keep your beloved organisation.

I. BACKGROUND FOR ALIASES (SYM LINKS)

There is a feature on unix's filesystems called ``symbolic
link''. These symbolic links are acknowledged as ``alias'' by the
finder, and the name is very self-explanatory.

An alias (or a symbolic link) for an item is a second name you give
to an item. To all applications, this second name looks like a regular
file thourgh which you can access the original one. Applications that
want to manage aliases can ask the system if a given file is an alias
or an original. And last, if you move an alias to the trash, the
original file is left intact.

If you create an alias of a folder app, you can then open the
application through the alias just like you would do with a normal
app.


II. APPLICATION OF ALIASES

Here's what I porpose: create an `Applications' folder in your home
folder, I call it $HOME/Applications, and create all the categories
you want as subfolders, like

$HOME/Applications/Internet
$HOME/Applications/Writing
etc.

Then open the system-wide /Applications folder and create aliases for
folder applications in whatever category you want, possibly many of
them (an alias is a few bytes big, an epsilon)! To create an alias in
the finder, use the COMMAND+L key or look for it in Finder's menu.

If you rename or move or destroy an alias, the alias itself is
modified and the original file (here a folder app) is kept untouched.


Note that aliases are a very useful ressource to organise your files
in a way such that some files show up in many places. The folder app
example is typical. You have a data vault (the /Applications
directory) and you do want to sort your data according to some more or
less orthogonal criteria, so that a data would show up in many
categories.


III. DRAWBACKS OF ALIASES

A drawback with aliases is that they do not update themselves: let's
say you have a file A and create an alias of A called B. Then you move
A: the target of B has moved and cannot be accessed through B which is
now useless.

There is another notion of alias (or links in amore unixish dialect),
they are hard links. Hard links are really a second name for a file,
not a sort of remembrance of the place a give file is, and in the
previous example, if B is an hard link (instead of an alias, or
symbolic link, or soft link --- whic are all synonymous) to A, you can
still use it to access A after A is moved.

However, hard links cannot be used to give a second name to a
directory (and especially to folder apps) because you are not allowed
to introduce cycles in the directory tree.

Last, if you are in mood for more technical details, you can open a
terminal and type

man ln
man unlink

This will show up some ``manual pages'', whose contents is of some
utility, depending of how accustomed with Unix-like systems you are.


Note: aliases are rather different from shortcuts in the MS-Windows
world, since a shortcut will not behave as if it were the orginal file
in most circumstances (according to my last experiment, which are
quite old). For example, if you create a shortcut for a picture, there
is no preview for the picture in the file file explorer. Because of
this, shortcuts in MS-Windows are quite an useless thing.
--
Best regards,
Michaël
.

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