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cd /usr/bin
ls

Try Search type:Application

Or on MacOS take a look at all the pfiles and see what they can control and what they can't

Try Search *.plist

Or say you want to find a way to make the dock transperent and you search for Dock Transperance. While the real term that the search will find is Dock Clearness.

Try Search Dock Transparency in Prefs, and, chances are, you get Dock Clearness. It's really smart about such things. Or, try search Dock, then browse the results. A whole lot better than sorting through pref tab after pref tab trying each label on for size.

Or that file you saved way back when you don't know the date you did it or what it is about but once you see it you know that is the one you need.

Do you know anything about the file? Then search for that. Nothing? Then search for type:document and start browsing!

Sure I like spotlight but there are some cases where it just fails me mostly because I am absent minded.

That's funny, cause as much as I like Spotlight, the only places it works for me is where I'm absent minded. My current project I can get right to in Finder; I need the search to find the project dealing with vampire bunnies I worked on last year. My last 20 emails I can find something in easier by just scrolling down in the list; I need the search when someone asks me about something they sent three days ago (or, exceedingly commonly, three hours ago).

IMHO, search is never a replacement for organization. I did some support work for a girls' softball team this year and thought I'd try out using Spotlight as my key organizer. So, I created a stored folder for Softball, etc. I found it was an order of magnitude faster just finding the file and opening it rather than going to the Spotlight saved search folder, waiting for the files to appear (Spotlight's quick, but not quick like Finder!), and then finding the file amongst the smaller stack.

Regarding "labels", OS X has had them for a few revisions, although you're limited to seven different colors which can not be added to, and each file can only have ONE label, not many. However, the one label per file is of course in addition to the organization you give your folders, so it fits many but not all requirements. Right click any file and set it's label color; voila! And you can use them as metadata in Spotlight.

The logical extension here are "instant" searches. For instance, sitting in my "Documents" directory, be able to filter the direct contents by the "Red" label with 1-2 button clicks, then be able to flatten the heirarchy and see everything in Documents or below with the Red label, then be able to select a file and see where it actually lies in the file system. I'm not talking about creating a new smart folder, specifying my search, selecting to search only in , etc; I'm talking about clicking a "flatten" and a "filter by label" button in the toolbar and the display changing to only those ... if you've seen WinCVS or MacCVS (http://www.cvsgui.org/) then you know what I'm talking about.

One that's also been around a while is Aegis. It was first released in 1991, so is not a newcomer to the scene.

I haven't used it personally, so I can't vouch for how well or poorly it works. I was looking into Source Code Control programs a while back and decided on good old CVS. Don't forget a GUI.

WinCvs also has a recursive add built in.

So here it goes...
What is your favorite revision system and why?
What is the URL?
Is it open source or proprietary?

1. OpenNap
2. XFree86
3. Cygwin
4. Emacs
5. Vi and Vim
6. Mojo Nation
7. Visual Tcl
8. MikTEX
9. Open Perl IDE
10. Mozilla
11. WinCVS
12. BitchX
13. Firebird
14. mySQL

Check out cvsgui.org. They have a Win32 client as well as Mac and Linux.

I've used the Win32 client and it works great.

CVS may have its flaws, but they are relatively minor compared to most of the competition. Sure, you can't rename/move things conveniently, which is irritating, but how often do you want to do that in reality? Not very, surely. Given the technical complications with moving a file (which might be branched, and so on) I can live with this.

We switched to CVS some time ago at work, when we needed our MLOC project source base to be accessible to people working from home or clients' sites. So far, it's proved pretty successful. We're prepared to sacrifice a couple of little things in exchange for a robust mechanism for remote file access and a decent set of tools for integrating changes from many people.

I should note that we also use WinCVS, which does make certain tasks easier. For example, you can do an atomic commit of multiple files from all over the source tree easily this way, much more easily than from the command line. Most of the awkward things about CVS are handled by using a decent GUI on top of it, in our experience.

We use WinCvs and Chora to version control both source code and documentation. In fact, it is because we were using Chora as a web interface to our documentation that I uncovered a bug a month or two ago affecting the handling of filenames with spaces (like Marketing Proposal 1.doc) that we often see in documents created by non-programmers. I fixed the bug myself and contributed the fix back into the Chora project, so you shouldn't see this problem in the latest version of Chora). I've packaged recent versions of Chora into zip files - available for download here. (Use Ctrl-F to search for Chora on the page)

I have to admit, though, that while the non-technical people at our company have managed to learn how to use CVS, it was not without a lot of struggle on their part. Maybe SourceSafe or Perforce would have been a better choice. Even so, what we have now works and people have become familiar with it, so I don't think we'll change.

My shop encountered a similar problem. We needed version control for developers as well as less-technical people who work on documentation. We also didn't want to setup 2 seperate systems. NOR did we want to setup Visual SourceSafe. Trust me, I've had plenty of experience with our clients using it.. it's lousy! (no tcp/ip, not free, and none too stable either) CVS is really solid, and if you're already using it, then great. I'm assuming that these non-technical people you've got are probably using MS Office. They probably don't want to write documents in XML, because they probably just love Word. Here's something we found for them. It's called TortoiseCVS and it's a Windows Explorer shell extention for CVS that works great. It uses overlays to colorize the icon's of documents in various CVS statuses (like up-to-date, conflict, uncommitted). Everything is done by right clicking on the document to get a new version, or commit your current version. For the more technically minded, you can even do tagging and branching through this simple interface. Best of all, it uses standard "CVS" subdirectories to handle the version control information. That means you can really use any other CVS gui (or command line) interface to do other things... like prepare profiles that have the module location already included that you can push out to these users.

So, until they start teaching command line CVS in high school... this should keep you going.

We used WinCVS at my last job. Now up to 1.2. Works decent, at my last job even the engineers weren't all that technical (gee, wonder if that's why we havent' made any money) and works OK.

There are GUIs for CVS for many operating systems (including Windows and MacOS) at cvsgui.org.
Non-technical people can be teached how to use 'add', 'update' and 'commit' in 15 minutes, at least it has worked in my company. (They use WinCVS for exchanging Excel documents with external clients and are happy with it.)