I have been using git annex for a while. I use it completely manually (i.e."git annex add .; git annex sync; git annex copy . --to=desktop") as a DIY Dropbox replacement.
I have some issues inherent with git annex but they will be reserved to another post.
What I want to ask about now is how to integrate my git annex workflow with macOS?
Specifically:
1) If I search for something in spotlight, it apparently does not search the 'names' of symlinks, and so it is impossible to have spotlight index the git annex archive? 2) Opening files in git annex, in particular, PDF files with Preview.app, the names of the files are the targets of the symlinks, not their names, so that you end up seeing "SHA256E-s146178--a7e80c95ffe943ceca774d7931651ab4c16574c6f4059ade342a3cdbda3a5ef9.pdf" as the title of the Preview.app window of the PDF you're looking at. This is especially heinous when you have many many open files and you're trying to find one of them and the titles just give you zero information. 3) Trying to attach some of these files into mail attachments, again, the filename the recipient gets is "SHA256E-s146178--a7e80c95ffe943ceca774d7931651ab4c16574c6f4059ade342a3cdbda3a5ef9.pdf" which is quite useless for them, or even harmful because it can be very confusing if there are 10 attachments from git annex and they all have these crazy names.
Is there anything that can be done about this? This seems to be a conflict between macOS insisting on referring to the target of symlinks as the true names for the files whereas git annex is happy with the names of the symlinks.
I have used several things to work around this, e.g., instead of spotlight I can run find . -iname "something" in the terminal to search my archive (I have one archive with all my files).
However it would be nice to integrate this into spotlight.
The bigger problem are the file names. Is it possible to fix this by using hard links instead? Or somehow fool macOS into reading the names of the symlinks instead of the names of the targets of the symlinks?
I also struggle with these issues on macOS.
One workaround would be to always use unlocked files,
The main disadvantage here is that you use double the disk space for every file. After switching to unlocked files you could then also switch to
thinmode:Which would only keep 1 copy of every file (using hardlinks), so you are back down to a normal amount of disk space, but you give up some of the protections of git-annex since you could easily delete the only copy of your files.
I have verified that using unlocked files and using unlocked-thin both fix file names in Preview and mail attachments. I'm not sure if both these methods allow files to be indexed by Spotlight.
I have also been hoping to integrate many of these features into git-annex-turtle using the Search and Spotlight developer APIs. Namely Core Spotlight could be used to index all
git-annexlocked/unlocked/present/not-present files and Quick Look APIs could be used to allow previewing of not present files using cached thumbnails.—Andrew