I am so happy with Drafts, the glaring elephant in the room, I guess part of the rigid philosophical spine of the designers, is the absence of the most basic element of computers since some rocks needed to be organized, so a caveman put some in a bush, and some in a cave - – FOLDERS.
I just past 1,000 drafts, have finally learned the basics of Markdown, and don’t want to give up Drafts. Nothing is like it. It is so dense and overfilled, but I don’t mind that, because it is serving the community and it’s not designed for me and none of it gets in my way except when I take a dive to learn something, and I can’t make sense of it.
I cannot - however - cope much longer with the fact that I can’t organize my travesty, and man cannot live by tags alone.
No folders? C’mon seriously? After a year, I still think there’s some principles spite involved in a quest to be different, but what am I missing?
I am open to the idea that someone is about to give me a few clicks and a solution, ill be embarrassed for a moment, but GRATEFUL, because I have missed a few inspirational moments lately because my OCD, ADHS brain said, “don’t waste your time, you know you’ll never find it again anyway”
Drafts has a feature called folders but they are not what you are expecting.
Drafts isn’t storing content in a file structure, but in a database, so there is an entirely different paradigm to managing drafts to managing files.
Think of it as a bucket and you ask Drafts to give you a set of Drafts (a folder if you will) by describing what you want with criteria.
If you want to save such criteria and work on a set of results, that is in effect what Workspaces are and I think is going to be the closest to what you want. Think of them as smart folders and you’ll probably get the gist pretty quickly.
Thanks for that. I’ve been using Drafts for years and organize with tags rather than Workspaces and often struggle finding my drafts. I set up Workspaces and it’s close enough to folders.
Jut one note: folders can be just conceptual as well as part of a file system. Ulysses uses a database and organizes in folders.
I think the concept would be grouping, and I think is what Ulysses employs as I’ll build to below.
Computer file systems were based on the real-world process of grouping documents into folders to keep related papers together. But as people began to realise that the constraints of the physical world need not apply in a virtual environment, other ways of storing and managing data were devised. While still predominantly file-based when it comes to data storage (but do look into in-memory database solutions like SAP HANA, AWS offerings, etc) , databases were the next evolution and can allow for dynamic surfacing of data based on criteria. At one point, Microsoft even planned to replace the traditional file system with a database as part of their Longhorn programme.
Databases can hold data in a variety of ways. You can get databases that hold data in structured, unstructured, semi-structured. They data can be stored relationally, hierarchically, etc. Only in the case of a specifically hierarchical database would you have to apply a one-to-optionally-many relationship which is equivalent to a folder structure. Such databases are very rarely used because the circumstances where such a relationship constraint enforcement is very limited.
Even when some hierarchical relationships are required, a more flexible database will be employed to allow for other relations that are not hierarchical, or for future proofing against a change.
As I understand it, Ulysses’ equivalent to ‘tags’ is ‘keywords’, and so I think we can infer from that having a many-to-many relationship, there is no one-to-many constraint inherent in the database choice.
This suggests that folders, which I believe are referred to as ‘groups’ in Ulysses, are simply a constraint the developers have chosen to apply. The logic might be to avoid users being faced with the everything in one bucket view that Drafts adopts, and there is certainly validity to that mindset if that was the case and what Ulysses is designed to do. I think it also is a natural fit given that Ulysses does support external folders of content on file systems, but this is also where is is divergent from Drafts as Drafts instead is constrained to import/export.
Hopefully, that clarifies the paradigm aspect a little further.