"It doesn't work because users are unwilling to go through and tag all their files."

This doesn't make sense. They "File -> Save" to a location, right? That's a tag. All metadata is tags. People give filetype suffixes to their filenames, right? That's a tag. They might "Save As -> Format", right? That's a tag. Maybe they "File -> Print" on January 17 at 3pm? That's a tag.

Oh and ALSO they are a 'superuser' who wants the photo to go into "Great Pics Of My Dog" tag? Cool, they apply that, and that's also a tag.

People can handle change, people can handle simple concepts, people use tags today, people can handle tags generally.

Getting users to tag data has already been attempted. Heck Office has had this built in for years (decades?).

We live in a world where after nearly 30 years of the folders paradigm, the vast majority of every day users still store everything on their desktop.

(Though IT policies are working to change this, forcing files to be stored on network drives and such).

Some more advanced users may use a folder called "work".

Years ago I went through and tagged all my photos. Of course the photo management system I used up and died. After that I gave up. I do have some photo organized and stored locally, but now days Google Photos handles most of that for me, including the auto-tagging.

When people sit down at a computer, they generally have a task in mind. Be it write a document, calculate with a spreadsheet, or send a picture of their dog to a friend.

Most people don't think ahead to "5 years from now I may want to find this document so I should think up of every possible word I may search for then and apply it as a tag."

Tagging data takes time, and a good deal of thought to have a coherent system. Then, technically, those tags need to persist and transfer across disparate OSs.

I personally love the idea of tags. My capstone project in college was exploring different UIs for tagging files, and trying to make the process as fast and friendly as possible.

But changing users habits is hard.

> This doesn't make sense. They "File -> Save" to a location, right? That's a tag.

The folder-hierarchy version of "unwilling to go through and tag all their files" is saving all files to the Desktop.

You asked: "Is this common enough a use case?"

Then you answered your own question: "Plenty of applications do just this today".

So yes, it is a common enough case that it could/should be built into the OS.

Well, OS could certainly offer some support, like file change detection, but the main indexing is often too application specific.

Photo albums wants to do face recognition. Music player wants BPM detection. Should those be done by OS? I do not think so.

Tags are a strict superset of folder functionality. There's nothing you can do with folders that you can't do with tags. You want nesting? Tags can nest. You want visual clues? Tags can have visual clues. Folders can be and sometimes are implemented as tags.

Well, tags and folders are identical. You can have the same file linked to from multiple folders at once. `ls` will even show you the number of folders the file is part of in the second column.

I have a FingerWorks iGesturePad on my desk right now, a 17-year-old device which is still to this day the most advanced multi-touch consumer product. My experience with this product teaches me that multi-finger input is not at all unnatural as you call it. You do it all day every day with everything in your life EXCEPT your computer; you would get accustomed to it in minutes or hours.

Didn't Apple buy Fingerworks and used the ideas if not the technology for the mobile devices?

Yes, and the laptop and standalone touchpads as well. Those touchpads are more similar to Fingerworks products than the touchscreen iDevices. I would even argue that Apple's current touchpads with haptic feedback are clearly superior to what Fingerworks offered, if you install third-party software to expand the range of gesture options. I've been using jitouch for close to a decade now, and on a MacBook Pro I use multitouch gestures at least twice as often as I use keyboard shortcuts.

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Why because of shutdowns? That's fair but most of us up here at this salary level can weather a month or two without pay so long as it finally arrives. I'd be more worried about working for a fascist, even indirectly.

Sure but we wouldn't go out looking for open doors. If you want me to patrol then you need to pay me.

No, not barbaric, that's the liability attached to all normal activities.

"Knew or should have known" is the standard. Boeing management knew or should have known that selling an essential safety system relying on a single sensor is categorically unsafe.

All blame to management unless the programmers knowingly miscoded the software.

I've always liked veggie burgers. The best ones are as good as very good hamburgers (in a different way). Some others are not so good.

If it's five lines of code then put the five lines in the abstract.