If you are working with the computer a lot, chances are high that the time you spent to do repetetive tasks is increasing significantly. I have the idea of "wormhole" folders, which for me would help a lot doing my daily stuff. It's basically a set of rules you can apply to any folder. These can be very simple, like:
- move all *.ogg files in my folder "downloads" to folder "~/music"
- move all *.avi files in my folder "downloads" to folder "~/movies"
- erase all "Thumbs.db" files in my folder "shared_pictures"
- copy all files containing the phrase "todo" to folder "share/tasks"
- copy all files in my folder "~/work" to folder "/media/backup/work"
- rename all files containing the phrase "by fb" to "written by Foo Bar"
This are more or less simple tasks which happen to occur a lot. Those rules can be "chained", so rules apply after others have processed. This is quite similar to rule sets of some applications, like the thunderbird message filter. I have heard that MacOS X has such a feature, but wasn't able to check it out. Anyway, i haven't seen this in Ubuntu->Gnome->Nautilus.
I made up some fake screenshots to illustrate how it could work. It surely lacks a lot of options i haven't thought of yet.
context menu
rules overview
set a rule
This feature is on my wishlist so long, that i can't understand why it's not basic functionality in every OS.
