I have a few groups of tags that are nested 2-4 layers.
When using them in notes, I am curious about a mechanism to fold them down only to show the last section. With maybe something like a hover state to unfold temporarily if needed?
Examples: tags for people in a group.
If I add several people to a note, it gets lengthy.
#Location of People/Group of People/Mary Anthony#
The above could fold down to something like:
##Mary Anthony#
With an extra starting # to or something similar to indicate it’s folded.
My experience it that if I get at the necessity to use 4th level of tag, it usually means that I should rather use combination of more simple tags. E.g. #group of people and #mary anthony in separate way, or #Location/group and #company/mary anthony etc. Almost all the time I can optimise for a simpler solution than 4 levels.
(Not to oppose your suggestion, just to comment about my experience with deep tagging)
Also in my opinion 4 levels are too much. On the other side using seperate tags (which i genrally would prefer in each case) leads to loosing the connection between tags. To give a simple example: #travel/italy and #recipe/italy. Actually you could use: #recipe, #travel and #italy. The good about this that italy appears just one time and is not seperated into two tags, means: you can list up all italian-related stuff in the notes list by clicking #italy in tag pane. But how to get a list of italian recipes in note list? The only way ist to use advanced search expressions in search field: you have listed all your #recipes in notes list and then you filter by #italy. Or you click #italy in tag pane and then filter by #recipe.
While that is a good solution to help shortening your tag hierarchy and to remove redundancy it also gives the possibility to easily list up things which belong together, f.e. #italy. If italy appears several times in different hierarchys it is not trivial for the average user to create a list of everything where italy appears. I am not sure if that is even possible with advanced tag expressions as i never tried.
To repeat an old request: it would be an amazing feature to choose tags in searchfield by an popup that replicates and shows the remaining tags of all those notes in the second pane as tree hierarchy so that they can be picked from that pop up menu. (Side note: that feature could also adress other requests from other users, f.e. viewing archived notes by tags)
@jasonburk
Something similar came also to my mind. I didn’t request it because i am really not sure if that is a good idea in regard to all side effects and developer costs. In my case i was thinking about giving aliases to tags inside the editor because i would like to have that alias name exported to doc/pdf rather than the full path of the tag
I would not use just single tags always (#italy #recipe) but combination of nested tags (#recipe/italy #ingredients/meat) however I would still be able to avoid deeper structure (#recipe/italy/meat). 3 levels in my use is maximum.
If italy appears several times in different hierarchys it is not trivial for the average user to create a list of everything where italy appears.
It is not so complicated, just type #*/italy in search field (or in case “italy” would appear as first level tag also, you would type #italy OR #*/italy Not super easy but not super difficult either.)
it would be an amazing feature to choose tags in searchfield by an popup that replicates and shows the remaining tags of all those notes in the second pane as tree hierarchy so that they can be picked from that pop up menu.
Yes, that would be indeed interesting feature for more advanced search.
@krssno It depends of course on your/our use case. We are not creating general ontologies but pragmatic sets according to how we need to use our systems. So if I would have a need to find a note according to a country generally, I would create such a tag. But if I would want just to separate my recipes (because I want to discriminate among them quickly as for my appetite on different types of cuisines), I would create nested tag with recipe/italy. And I might create another tag friends/italy as I will never have a need to search for my friends from Italy as well as all Italian recipes.
As for a long list of single tags in tag pane: My solution is to group all the necessary status/project/type tags above (using alphabetical sort and characters like . = + etc which always sort above alphanum. characters. Thus I have nested tags like #=project/, #.type, #+marketing etc. with children tags underneath. I have not many of such parent tags (usually up to 5-7). That makes actual use (search, focus etc) very quick. (I can even pin them if I want). And thus I can afford the rest of “subject” tags to be quite long. I use combination of simple tags or simple hierarchical tags (trust/child_development - for notes about how trust is built during childhood etc).
At the moment I have around 450 of first level (parent) thematic tags. And I have no problem with this huge long list as they are at the bottom of the list. If I need to focus on some of them, I just press the first character on keyboard (when tagbar is in focus) and find them quickly. But usually, I click on this tag in some note, I do not often search for thematic tags in sidebar. And in Bear 1.0, I used Alfred macro for quick search for tags (and note names), which I hope its author will re-create also for Bear 2.0 as that was immense help in speed (+ I hope developers will create some form of command palette/quick search bar later after release of B2.0, as they suggested in discussions before)
Wow, that is much. I generally try not to exceed 3 levels and 10 items per level. In other apps like bookmark managers and similar i even try not to exceed 2 levels. I would feel uncomfortable with such a long list. I guess it is a mixture of who is tagging and for what purpose.
Yes, definitely. I use them so liberally because I consider them rather “hoooks” for possible interesting interconnection of my notes/information (in Zettelkasten way). I do not categorise by them in strict sense (for categorisation I use very narrow set of tags). So it is common that I have tagged only 2 or 3 notes by the same thematic tag.
And I use them liberally in the sense that I tag one note with many (3, 4, 5…) thematic tags, often somehow creatively (the question is “in which subject context I would like to see this note again?”). Plus my typical use case is not to search for interesting keyword in huge list of tags in sidebar, but rather to click on that tag on particular note (“what else I have to this theme?”)
I generally try not to exceed 3 levels and 10 items per level.
I have very similar rule, because having more than 10 subtags in second or third level starts to be confusing. However it is paradoxically the reason, why I have most of thematic tags as parent (first-level) tags.
