Document-Oriented Desktop [Introduction]

A general dissatisfaction with desktop computing has led me to start thinking about what it is I want from my computer, and to see what it would be like to evaluate the requirements of a computing system that manages documents rather than processes or applications.

I do not intend to tackle the problems of user interface design or graphic design as such. The system described is as relevant to the command line shell (e.g. bash) as it is to the graphical shell (X11, Windows, or that shiny MacOS stuff). What I want to encapsulate is the concept of a document-centric user-interface that presents information to the user that is logical and intuitive, removing the emphasis from the desktop as a suite of applications.

I do not wish to critique existing desktops. Suffice to say that they are all very pretty and, once properly configured, deliver some reasonable conveniences. However, they provide limited facilities for the management of documents.

I find file management to be a chore; it is quite often difficult to assign a document to a single category and subsequently remember how I originally categorised that document (what directory should I file this document under? Where is the document that I filed away?). Unix links help, but have limitations and cannot be used on non-Unix platforms.

This is one of the reasons I use "find" so much:

find /home/malk -type f -exec grep -i "something pertinent hopefully" {} . \;

Crude interface, but effective execution. And yet, just searching and categorising isn't the whole solution. For a given document, how can I know what I have done with it? Where did it come from? To whom have I sent it? What is the history of this document?

For a while, I was using my GMail account as a document manager. It's not the most efficient way to store documents, but I'm not paying for the storage. It does the basics very well, but I found some of the things I was doing were a bit of a hack -- sending messages to myself in order to provide annotations to a document (these notes show up as messages in what GMail terms a "conversation"). The labels, filtering and searching are fantastic. GMail is not integrated into the desktop and applying a hack (albeit a very clever networking hack) such as GmailFS doesn't do anything to advance the user's interface to their information.

I'm not sure I'm making a very good case here... Instead of my rambling on, let me just present the features I would like to see in the operating environment of my computer as a series of articles in this blog.