The search for the perfect digital filing cabinet

It was a choice among DevonThink, Yojimbo, Together, & EagleFiler. There are supposed to be a handful more in that list, but they were immediately junked either because they were primarily note-taking apps or lacked serious organization.

These apps, unfortunately, have yet to be christened with a short & sweet category such as “text editor” or “graphic viewer.” No one really knows what to call it — file managers, archival system, bloated explorer/finder?

Software vendors go the easy route and just refer to them as apps meant to “keep your files together in one place.”

And so the name digital filing cabinets. After all, these apps are meant to organize your folders & files, much like your favorite GTD steel cabinet, you David Allen fanboy you.

What you’ll get

The standard feature set of digital filing cabinets include:

• Two ways of organization: folders & tags.
• Files or information about the files are stored in some database to facilitate searching
• Previews
• On-the-fly creation of notes (& instantly tagging them thereto)
• Web archiving

And then there were two

The list aforementioned was further cut down to two: EagleFiler and Together. The rest were ditched either because they store files in a proprietary database system, or their interface is something I can really not work with. (I’m a girl. I need something pretty.)

I found myself using EagleFiler more. Sure, I love Together’s shelf, it’s portrait view, and sleeker interface; but it finally boiled down to speed. Together could not handle the amount of files I had, even when I separated them into different libraries.

Two other things I can’t stand with Together: inability to work simultaneously with more than 1 library, and the default .trnote extension for newly created notes. Really now.

After 2 weeks, I uninstalled EagleFiler and ended up with Path Finder.

“But that’s not in the list!” you exclaim.

Care ko.