I love myself an empty desktop. If you require yours to be ruled by chaos, then tuck is not for you.
Likewise do I feel about sorting stuff into folders. While this process could in theory be automated, I'd rather have complete control over what goes where and I want that process to as quick as possible i.e. not using drag and drop.
tuck is a command line tool - written in Ruby - for filing your incoming clutter into predefined folders.
Whenever you call tuck he goes through your "busy" folders (by default that would be 'Desktop' and 'Downloads') and asks where to put each file (not folders!), to which you reply with a single character.
- First copy tuck (including the configuration file 'tuck.config.yaml') into a folder that's easily reachable e.g. your home directory.
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Add folders to watch and destination-key pairs to 'tuck.config.yaml' with a plain text editor (e.g. TextEdit).
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<p>Open a new Terminal window, navigate to the directory <strong>tuck</strong> sits in and invoke him as follows:</p>
<pre>./tuck</pre>
<p>Or make use of the '-p' option to show a QuickLook preview for every entry:</p>
<pre>./tuck -p</pre>
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For each encountered file enter the character corresponding to the desired directory and confirm by hitting return. Is no character given the file will be skipped, a single space will show a preview and an exclamation mark will stop the script altogether.
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Happy tucking!
The idea is to eventually turn tuck into a commercial Cocoa application. However, on top of the basic functionality tuck currently offers one can expect the following features to be added in the near future:
- Make it cross-platform (currently OS X/UNIX[?] only)
- Add a dialog for moving the current file someplace else completely
- Blacklist for watched directories so folders can also be tucked
- Make it possible to define rules (RegExp) for handling similar files