Best practice for keeping IDE tidy?

Hi,

Just wondering what the best practice is for keeping the Arduino IDE tidy?

On the Mac, since it's all hierarchical drop down menus it's getting harder on a trackpad based laptop to use.

  1. Sketchbook: This menu is filling up fast!

I need a advised way to group like with like, and revisions as well.

Examples is a better format, but not perfect.

  1. Examples: Some have an extra layer of drop down menu.

How can I get quickly to the examples? i.e. Remove an unnecessary hierarchical drop down menu level?

Thanks kindly.

I keep one folder for "Basic test", such as when I get a new LCD or sensor that comes with a really basic "hello world" type example. I find I often need to refer back to these simple examples when I've gone too far down the rabbit hole. I probably have 50 files there, with a few subfolders.

For stuff I'm really working on, I put it all in Subversion source control. That way I don't need to keep copies of different stages of the working program. If I finish a bit of work (like at 2am) then I commit it to Subversion with a comment describing what I just did. Then when I get stuck in the rabbit hole again, I can back out to that previous point.

I also use "tags" in Subversion, like when somebody leaves my house with a piece of hardware, I tag a copy of the firmware that they took. Then if they have problems in the future, I can always go back to that tag and re-create their problem. I don't use "branches". They don't seem to be useful to me as a lone developer.

Having a Subversion repository means that finished projects can be deleted out of my working Arduino folder but I can always retrieve them if necessary. I also keep all my Arduino libraries in Subversion, for obvious reasons.