Not the wires under at / under my desk.
I am looking for solutions how to hang all my various cables in my workshop for easy access. Tired of sorting trough drawers with coiled up wires…
I’ve used a combination of
- For longer cables – ethernet, etc – a peg board with hangers for coiled cables tied closed with velcro cable ties.
- For smaller cables, a set of plastic shoebox-sized or smaller containers – one for each type of cable (USB-C, USB-2, etc.) – cleanly bundled or tied with smaller cable ties.
- For 2 to 3 foot connector cables (audio, video) a cable wall hanger – which is a board with pairs of metal or rubber grips. One end of the cable slips in between a pair and hangs down. Easy to organize. The cable hanger can also be mounted on the peg board from #1.
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I’ve never hung any up but use clear shoebox-sized containers like @anon41602260. Every container is labeled and every cable is tied. I’ve got larger containers for the larger cables.
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Have that now, but it doesn’t work for me. I have too many cables that I frequently need to connect “things”
Option 3 is exactly what I was looking for thanks!!!
Almost bought it only to realize that the slots are to wide for the usb cables.
You could make your own version of the claw with an offcut of wood and a saw to cut cable slots, and a drill to make a small cup at the top to hold the cable end but I suspect that unless you can hide it inside a cupboard both the original metal one and a diy version would look messy fast.
A couple of other options:
- A ‘grid it’ which is a board with a lot of elastic straps - poke the cables under the elastic. I bought one of these for travel once, but found it too heavy. Good to have one of each type of cable in it for when a cable is needed in a hurry.
- A kitchen utensil bar. Sling the cable over the bar and use a Velcro tie (or wire twist) to hold the two ends together. Something similar has worked well at work for all sorts of cables. Good for volume if you have lots of cables. Again, something for inside a cupboard rather than on display.
At home other than the grid-it, I just have small boxes labelled up with the cable type. Cables inside are coiled and secured with Velcro ties.
Periodically I purge. There are only so many spares needed 
For some cables - probably the shorter ones, you could use a magnetic knife strip. Then just put the larger end on the strip and let the other end hang free.
I saw this on Lifehacker years ago and never actually got around to using the trick myself I must admit!
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tl;dr check out the inexpensive bin/rack combos from Harbor Freight.
Through lots of trial and error, I have discovered racks of small bins from Harbor Freight. Unlike drawers, boxes, and neatly filed ziplock bags, these let me:
–keep larger items like power adapters right with the cables
–scan the whole collection in one place
–grab or put away very easily (key because I’m lazy)
–not hate the way the cable stash looks
–group items both in the same bin and by “neighborhood” in the rack
That last point, an easy 2-level filing system, is huge. All the video cables, for example, are in a few adjacent bins: the video neighborhood. Both currently unused DVI cables are in one bin. (Why DVI? My wife won’t give up that particular monitor. Why 3 DVI cables? Different colors and lengths from past office setups)
I looked briefly at Amazon and Home Depot, but ended up at Harbor Freight because I noticed smaller bins there than I had yet seen anywhere else. Plus, I could see the bins in person and get them cheap. I started with this, 20 bins for 10 bucks and in gray, which is nice for some settings. But when I wanted to mount them on a wall, I learned that fastening the included mountings is easy, but lining them up nicely was beyond my patience.
So I switched to this. You do still have to fasten the mounting panel to the wall, but it has far fewer holes to drill and --this is key–the alignment is built into the plastic. Plus, it’s provides a nice black background for the bins.
For those not familiar with Harbor Freight, it is a fairly common store selling cheap-but-cool hardware, industrial, and oddball stuff. (You can also buy online, but the store experience is fun if you are a maker or just curious. At least where I shop, the clientele is mainly tradesmen, the layout is logical but maybe not intuitive, and the vibe is old-school “discount” store.) In general, their prices are low but the quality is often lower than at Home Depot or above. Still, their near-constant sales and coupons can make the value very good, And I figure low-quality bins meant for real, metal hardware will be more than adequate for our cables.
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