After getting a bit obsessed with non-hierarchical representations of data in the file system, I came to the conclusion that the most expedient path to a general solution was just to make a search-engine for the file system that could gather all those disparate metadata formats. Luckily most of that work was done for me– Linux already has a pretty spiffy full-text indexer called . The only problem left, as I saw it, was the interface. How might I make queries look more like familiar directories? Where do you put the search bar? How might I represent all that metadata?

Here’s the short answer: