Part 4: Traversing the File System & Taking Notes

This is Part 4 of an ongoing series detailing my experience dumbing down my phone, taking ownership of my data, and learning a lot about FOSS along the way. NOTE: These are living documents that will surely change with time!

This part continues my exploration of FOSS app options for my now de-Googled phone...

The File Explorer

This is another item I hadn't considered presenting a difficulty. I had been using "File Manager +" for quite a while. The basic Graphene Files app was like the Google Files app, very simple, and annoying to navigate. I heavily rely on my home server where I store all of my backups including my full photo library.

While I didn't have too much trouble finding a file explorer that allowed me to seamless browse my network storage alongside local storage, I ran into some trouble with the actual experience. I have my photos in monthly folders but with twin toddlers in the house a single month is often around 1,500 photos - sometimes more. This isn't my primary reason for needing a file explorer and I'm planning on setting up a Photoprism instance in the near future, but it still seemed like the best way to evaluate my options.

Amaze seemed nice at first but quickly froze up while trying to navigate these large folders. Ghost Commander seemed to handle them mostly OK, though it often needs to reload and ask for my SSH password. I also couldn't find a way to switch to an icon/thumbnail view. Click and preview worked fine and I could swipe without having to exit and re-enter the preview mode but this was still far from ideal. At the moment I'm using Material Files, which has so far been handling everything without any major problems.

The Notes System

Notes in general have been something I've spent a lot of time with. Last year I started using Obsidian.md with the Git plugin for syncing. My usage of Obsidian has been an entire project in and of itself, especially as I've developed a personal workflow with templates and various customizations, and integrated it heavily into my dayjob. I exported all of my Keep notes and almost everything from my Notion account and converted them to markdown format, which made moving them into my Obsidian vault as simple as dropping those files into a folder.

The only two things I'm still using in Notion are my shopping list and my recipe database. The shopping list is something my wife and I both use constantly so it needs to sync immediately and be easy to access and manipulate. For now that means sticking with Notion, mostly for my wife's sake, until I figure out an alternative we can transition to seamlessly.

My recipe database is just a beast that I'm not sure how to handle yet. I've been using the Notion web-clipper in my browser to "clip" recipes I want to save, this automatically adds the page as an entry in my recipe database and scrapes the URL, title, and recipe into the body of the entry. I then give it a few tags for easy browsing ("quick & easy," "chickpeas," "Korean," etc.) and set the "cover" image to a picture of the completed dish from the website. I've got a nice image-centric board that's easy to browse visually or filter by ingredients and tags plus multiple filtered views like "On Deck." These are recipes where I have ticked the "On Deck" custom-property box meaning "I'm planning to make this soon," which then makes revisiting what I need while building the grocery list easier and pulling up the recipes when it comes time to actually cook. Each entry also has a notes field so I can add what we all thought of the meal or any modifications I made to it or want to make in the future. Moving this database isn't something I've thought a lot about yet just because it sounds like a pain and I really like how I've got things. So for now I haven't fully given up on Notion.

I've had some trouble with the Obsidian mobile app syncing and annoying conflicts in the workspace and plugin config files but I think that's been more an issue with me being bad at Git than it is some problem with the app. I've gotten that mostly figured out now but the longterm plan is to move to using Syncthing and my personal server rather than relying on GitHub for storage.