Feature request: Folders or Groups for notes

Bear is the only editor that I think really does tags well and I think it’s in part because it only supports tags is a big reason why. Every single attempt I’ve seen at combining folders with tags always ends up compromising how tags work and making them clunky.

Doing tags well I think is one of Bear’s main value propositions. If you aren’t able to make Bear’s tags work for you I don’t see why you even like Bear. At that point, you might as well use something else. Bear’s excellent tag implementation is one of the great things that makes Bear what it is. I’d be very sad if that was compromised in an attempt to add a folder (which again: would just make Bear like other apps).

Sorry for my resistance here, but I’m just really worried adding folders would ruin Bear and make me dislike it the way I do most note apps. Bear works uniquely well, I literally don’t feel like there is anything else that works as well as Bear does with its tags.

Hi!

I would put my argumentation into another direction: Tags are folders and folders are tags - basically they represent the same way of organizing notes. A further is way is the cross-linking between notes.

Nested tags are folders with the additional attribute that you place the same into different folders.

So i would tell people asking for folders that they should regard the nested tags as folders

Well, because markdown is structured text, the search works really well and it’s easy to find notes. The longer i use bear, the less the tags work for me because i want to use the bear platform for multiple domains, so having it all in one “workspace” is too cumbersome.

Tags work great for apps like read it later apps where searching for content besides the title is time consuming, so tags add a valuable level of structure for finding what you are looking for across a broad set of saved links.

Both of you seem to assume that people who want folders have some cognitive deficiency preventing organizing using tags. Frankly, the main reason i adopted bear was that its search was excellent, in large part because structured data permits easier searching.

I have the same set of notes in bear and in craft, as i wanted to try out the other app like any reasonable person would (probably including bear devs). The existence of tags vs folders really doesn’t affect me at all for either app, but it is clear that there is a difference between these two metaphors. Imagine you are a biochemistry student and you have one folder for “organic chemistry review” notes and another folder for “membrane receptor” notes. Now, there may be notes in each folder that you want to tag with “#acid-base” because that concept affects organic chemistry AND membrane receptors. But you don’t necessarily want a separate acid-base high level folder; it becomes too cumbersome to access your categories if everything is grouped in high Level folders. Tags are great because they provide metadata that you can create groupings independently of the folder categories; you can choose how to group your ideas together, so when you are revising i. The context of membrabe receptors for the exam on that subject, you can access that context via the folder, but when you are revising across disciplines issues pertaining to acid-base, you can access the tag.

Again, i want to emphasize that this isn’t even a feature that I use; i just think the “anti-folder” outcry is silly. From a feature bloat perspective, it adds no feature bloat because it is treated essentially the same by the database.

I started a new workspace in craft because i wanted to start a new set of notes for a new job and didn’t want them mixed in with my bear notes (as i tried this already in bear last year and it was really annoying trying to arbitrarily create index notes and all these nested tags and crap to try and make an ad hoc system for accessing my note structure for subjects unrelated to many of my existing bear notes). It took a bit to get used to craft and initially i used it just like i use bear, but as i got more used to it now i kinda ‘get’ the Craft ecosystem and started to make use of the nested pages, direct block linking, etc, and might continue using it because now it doesn’t feel as clunky to me as it once did and it permits me to have different workspaces. I was surprised to like it, because before this i was an adamant fan of tags, but i’m actually not missing them much, as in reality my bear tags have become so bloated in number that it’s rarely useful for me to use them.

This isn’t designed as a battle of the PKM apps or whatever, just an anecdote that there are probably many other users like me who are fairly reasonable but don’t particularly want an app prescribing what metaphor we use to organise our lives, and may find themselves migrating to a different app that is less prescriptive, just as many of us migrated TO bear because it was refreshingly less bloated than evernote.

I don’t envy app developers who have to deal with meeting demands of their user-base. But I don’t really see why the topic of folders is so polarizing.

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While I’m pretty ambivalent about folders, being able to have separate vaults / areas would be idea. @Eleanor 's suggestion of being able to change the vault by clicking where the bear text is now is pretty much spot on what I was thinking.

In terms of use case, I have three main areas in Bear, work related notes and documents (code, notes etc), personal stuff and business things (contracts, invoices etc). I don’t want my personal notes showing up in work searches, or contracts or invoices showing up when I’m trying to find a code snipped for someone at work. Particularly since you can’t lock notes with PDFs attached…

At the moment I’ve moved business docs to Notes and password protected the personal stuff, but it’s a faff, adds a layer of complexity both in creating documents and managing tag hierarchies that could be easily addressed via being able to have separate areas.

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I totally agree with you. Having all tags/notes organised in one workspace clutters the left pane of bear. The tag tree grows to an extent that makes it hard to work with. Currently there is no way to organise the tags but only by alphabetically sorting.

You misunderstood me, probably due to my bad english. As you can read in another of my posts my approach was not to prefer tags over folders but to merge their way of working. I didn’t want say: Take the tags as folders. Rather than that i wanted to point out that actually the nested tags in bears and the frequently requested folders basically are the same way to organise notes, especially when compared to cross linking and backlinking. I think that people wants to create tags BEFORE adding a note to it, so that they have a tag structure already existing: so notes can be added to these tags WITHOUT writing these tags in its fully length. I am convinced that exactly that is the feature that people mean when they ask for folders. And believe me, i know how cumbersome it would be to place inside of mac finder a file into a folder by writing the whole path. So you say there is a difference between tags and folders. My answer was: yes, there is, but rather than adding a second organisational element to tags, just merge their functionality :wink:

I think here the power of cross and backlinking is a better way for evident reasons. When you create an own note for acid bases you have many advantages: you can write a short note about acid bases, what they are and so on; the text to it may contain links to other notes; the list of backlinks ARE the connection you desire; and if in the presentation of the backlinks the surrounding text of the crosslink is presented, then you can even see in which context the link to acid bases appears. backlinks reduces the necessity for tagging

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Just to at the start: people get heated up about note taking apps because they’re extremely important to people. These apps are important because they help people think. They really matter to people, but people are also different and thus you get some conflict about how they want them to be. I care a lot about this, but I wan’t to make clear that I don’t think anyone is bad or anything like that if they disagree with me. Disagreeing is obviously completely fine!

Both of you seem to assume that people who want folders have some cognitive deficiency preventing organizing using tags.

What??? No, I certainly don’t think so! Apps like Bear tools to support our cognition and the fact that people think in a variety of ways is evidenced by the different kinds of note taking apps that exist out there. The variety exist because poeple are different! I would never claim that any way of using tools for enhancing cognition in a “wrong” way would imply cognitive defiency. That’s would be some terrible ableist stuff.

All I’m saynig is that Bear works well for me, because of it’s razor-like simplicity and it’s honestly the only note taking app that has a note-taking system that actually works well for me. The reason I feel strongly about it is that I’m afraid that moving away from that razor-simplicity will ruin the app for me and I’ll be left without a good note taking app that works well for me.

Frankly, the main reason i adopted bear was that its search was excellent, in large part because structured data permits easier searching.

Is Bear alone in having good search? Doesn’t for example Apple Notes have really good search as well? Isn’t Craft’s search pretty good too? Or the search in iA Writer? Or in Ulysses?

This is the reason I don’t understand why people want to add folders to Bear. If you like folders there are already many excellent note taking apps that support it. Generally speaking: the value proposition of Bear is in parge it’s simplicity. Add to much stuff and Bear looses what make’s it unique for those it works well for. All the other apps are quite complicated in comparison.

Again, i want to emphasize that this isn’t even a feature that I use; i just think the “anti-folder” outcry is silly. From a feature bloat perspective, it adds no feature bloat because it is treated essentially the same by the database.

It’s not bloat related to performance, but bloat related to the user interface. I’m afraid that I’ll loose the simplicity of Bear that makes it work so well for me. A note taking app is the single most important app I use on my devices. Bear alone is keeping me on Apple devies.

There reason I’m so up in arms is that there’s a long list of excellent high quality apps that use folders as an organizing structure. People who like folders are spoilt for choice. Bear is one of the few really good tag oriented options (specifically: they allow you to nest tags). Why can’t we at least have this one high quality app that works well with nested tags?

But, let me end with this: if Bear finds a way to add folder or vault support without affecthing those who don’t use it at all I would be okay with that. That being said: I’ve ever actually seen that in any other app. It always ends up worsening the UI, but I could be wrong of course.

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I think here the power of cross and backlinking is a better way for evident reasons. When you create an own note for acid bases you have many advantages: you can write a short note about acid bases, what they are and so on; the text to it may contain links to other notes; the list of backlinks ARE the connection you desire; and if in the presentation of the backlinks the surrounding text of the crosslink is presented, then you can even see in which context the link to acid bases appears. backlinks reduces the necessity for tagging

I echo this sentiment. After I started linking stuff together I tag much less frequently and I have very strict specific categories of stuff I tag and it’s always within a sub tag such that my top level tag system stays clean.

This is what my tag list looks like:

And yes there’s a tag called tag there which is the only one that I kinda treat like a freeform tag. Athough I’m lately questioning whether I even need it considering what @krssno pointed out.

I considering the top level tag a way to create fast navigation to stuff I might want to view. The most clear example of this is media where I have tags for recommendations (or just thoughts) about things like movies and books. It’s very fast to add to it and and it’s very fast to look things up.

But how could you be affected by the workspace/vault feature if you just remain in your workspace? Eleanor posted here how workspaces could be implemented in the ui in a non obtrusive way. It would be a reasonable feature that doesn’t distract those who don’t want to use it. Such kind of features are not stuff like: “hey, tags are not enough, here you have some folders, but probably you need also some labels, and not to forget some keywords. Combine that all with metadata in yaml front matte and create some fancy views in left pane.”

I know that there is much bloat in many apps, take obsidian as horrible example. But i would not declare each new feature as a potential reason that bears charakter will get lost :wink:

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My scepticism mostly comes from never having seen it done well in other apps and seeing apps loose what made them great when they add features.

The way @Eleanor described does look like a good idea! I apologize for not looking at more closely earlier! I’m still afraid that next up people will just complaing and demand that Bear add a UI for more convenient/faster vault switching and before you know it they add it in a way that compromise it elsewhere after all. I’ve seen so many apps over the years get worse from complexity.

Concrete example: Paper by FiftyThree/WeTransfer used to have this very smooth undo feature that worked in a single motion, but eventually they added a feature which meant you’d have to differentiate between that and a other, and thus they added a level of indirection. This meant you lost the smooth undo in single motion feature and it became clunky. It has remained like that ever since and as far as I can tell there aren’t any apps that do that either. I basically lost an app I loved because an feature had to be added. Bear’s simplicity works so well for me so I’m so afraid of loosing it. I love this app. It’s far and away my favourite app and I’m so happy it works so well. I’d be so sad to loose that. Currently there aren’t any sketching apps for iPad that I actually find efficient. They all feel clunky compared to how Paper by FiftyThree launched a decade ago.

I think constraining the UI complexity of apps while adding features is extremely hard and it’s so tempting to just add stuff to make users happy, but I think there really is something to be said for minimalism. This is why there are features that I do want them to add (inline backlinks), I totally understand developers being careful about adding things. Simplicity is a feature in itself!.

Granted, it’s probably not impossible. If anyone can do it it’s ShinyFrog. I just hope they’re very careful if they do it.

You are very right here. Seemingly small changes lead to necessary consequences. What would happen if bear devs would introduce folders additionally to tags? Currently it is simple: each tagged note can be found in the tag tree; if a note is not tagged you can find it in the “Note”-folder or in its subfolder “untagged”. That means you can start creating new notes without bothering where to place them by tagging. Once you know how to tag them, you just go in the “untagged”-folder.

Adding folders would double that effort: you would have “untagged” notes and “unsorted” notes. Currently you have just tagged or untagged notes. After an implementation of folders you have: a) untagged and unsorted notes, b) tagged and unsorted notes, c) untagged and sorted notes, d) tagged and sorted notes. Furthermore: each tagged note (created from tag tree) would automatically be unsorted and force you to place it in a folder whereas in a tag-only environment nothing has to be done anymore. And so on.

I trust them. :smiley: :wink:

I remember Gmail starting with tags, and I found it quite confusing. Later they changed some things that made them better. They made them a bit more like folders I guess, which I quite like:

  • drag and drop items to another ‘folder’ (switches tag)
  • making a ‘subfolder’ with a mouse click instead of only typing (adds a subtag with ‘/…’)
  • selecting a ‘folder’ (tag) only shows messages from that tag (and not subtags)

That last point is something I would like to see in Bear actually. For instance:

When you have a ‘Work’ tag and ‘work/businesss’ and ‘work/marketing’ tags. The items that are just tagged as ‘work’ are hard to find. When you click ‘work’ in the sidebar it might show you 20 ‘work/business’ notes and 40 ‘work/marketing’ notes before you see a ‘work’ note.

I would very much like to see just the main notes (with the tag selected in sidebar) only (and NOT the notes from the ‘subtags’. (or those notes could be first, on top and maybe highlighted?)

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I would not like that but i can see why you prefer that.

In ulysses app in the note list the notes (or sheets in their terminology) appear grouped by folder and subfolders which names are also displayed inside the note list. They act as separators. That could be a solution that serves both needs. Advantage is that you easily can see which note belongs to what tag. There is only one little flaw: since notes can contain #tag and #tag/subtag at the same time, the same notes could appear several times

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