Natural arrangement: A novel and intuitive perspective on filesystem re-organization

Abstract

Proper semantic categorization and organization of filesystem is the key to find files and folders later easily. There is a significant role of rearrangement of files between different folders by cut/copy and paste while organizing a filesystem. Conventional file browsers have only unidirectional file copy system where a file can be copied only between one folder to another at a time. However, there are three more kinds of such rearrangement exist; between one-to-many folders, many-to-one folder and many-to-many folders. The limitations of unidirectional copy of existing file browsers require the user to simulate many-to-one folder rearrangement by doing one-to-one folder copy repeatedly. Whereas, the natural strategy to copy items in a many-to-one relation is to pick up items from each source and then copy them together into the destination. This paper describes a novel file browser design that implements the natural strategy of file copy between many-to-one folders. It also discusses the efficiency of the scheme compared to conventional file browsers by a KLM-GOMS model analysis.