Externals added to the path good structures.

Hey all,
My library is getting unwieldy and I am wondering what others do. So, I have been learning PD for over six years now on my own with never really taking a programming class. I have learned much of it all on my own. I am not a programmer.

I am on a mac.

I have .pd files in a few places and it is getting to be an absolute mess. I have files in Document/Pd/externals, in a file in my Desktop, and other places in compositions I am working on. Though, also what I find annoying is that when I add a new path with a new Folder if that Folder has Folders in it, I have to also make those Folders paths as well.

Are there suggestions on how to organize my files better? I would love to be able to organize my pd patches in separate folders, but is that not what others do?

@raynovich I use the [declare] object instead of paths, keeps the paths list shorter and more manageable and also gives you a nice list of dependencies right in the patch so you never have to wade through the patch trying to figure out what it needs if you want to share the patch or copy it to a different machine. If you need a sub-folder you just declare the sub-folder. Use absolute paths when you declare, this way you can move the patch and it will still find what it needs. I generally have a sub-patch in each patch for declares and I avoid declaring folders, just declare the abstraction directly so I never have to try and figure out which abstractions a given patch uses, just open the declare sub-patch and it is all there. In my pd folder I have all my current patches, an abstractions folder, a folder for patches I am not currently working on and a folder for reference patches. I do my best to avoid making abstractions which only have use in a single patch, I will figure out how to generalize it to make it more useful for other patches so it can live in my abstraction folder without cluttering it up and helps avoid needing folders for patches. When a patch must have a folder it goes in the pd directory with the patch and I declare it instead of keeping the patch in it's own directory, this is mainly to minimize having to navigate folders as much.

Using [declare] to explicitly declare individual abstractions also makes it easier to clean your abstraction folder, a simple shell script can check for abstractions which are not used by any patch or ones that just get used by a single patch so you can check them out to see if they are worth keeping or should be moved too the folder of that one patch which uses them.

Hmmm. .I like it. I am guessing I should not go back to old programs to do this, but I could start doing this now.