Feature request: index folders and suggest filing location

Talk, speculate, discuss, pontificate. As long as it pertains to Hazel.

Moderators: Mr_Noodle, Moderators

Hi Hazel team,

I recently purchased Hazel after reading a paperless guide by David Sparks. I am excited about the application and I am writing with a feature request which I think would take Hazel to another level.

I think it would be great if Hazel would index file folders and be able to suggest folders for filing (if none of the existing Hazel rules apply). It would sort of be for files what MailHub is for Mail.app. Here's an example use case:

- I configure Hazel to process any file that is in my Actions folder and that has " hz " in the filename
- I scan a file into the Actions folder
- I rename the file "2013-03-27 Receipt AcmeCompany Anvil $50 hz"
- Hazel sees that none of my existing rules would result in anything being done to that file
- Hazel compares the filename to the indexed list of my folders
- Hazel asks if I'd like to file the folder in "Companies/AcmeCompany" or in "Products/Anvils" or to type in the name of another folder (with predictive functionality a la MailHub or MsgFiler)
- After I tell Hazel what to do, Hazels would then ask if I'd like to create a new rule that would have resulted in the file being automatically filed (of course Hazel could suggest a rule but the user would have to edit).

What do you think?

Thank you,
Erik
emikysa
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Mar 27, 2013 2:36 pm

Interesting idea though automatic rule creation is quite tricky. While it may be obvious to you that there's some correlation in the name, files have many attributes and it may end up also correlating in this one particular instance but won't hold up as you receive more files.

In any case, probably not something I'll throw in in the short term but I'll add it to the feature database for future consideration. Thanks for the suggestion.
Mr_Noodle
Site Admin
 
Posts: 11193
Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2006 1:30 am
Location: New York City


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