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Bear-style nested tags


jyc23

Idea

I recently had the pleasure of using the iOS note app called Bear and I have to say, I'm a huge fan of how it handles tags -- in particular, nested tags. I wonder if something similar could be adopted by Evernote? 

The key difference between Bear-style tag nesting and Evernote-style tag nesting is that, in Bear, the combination of a parent tag plus a child tag yields a unique tag. That means you can actually have multiple tags of the same name, as long as they are each children of different tags. This makes it easy to set up a real parent/child relationship between groups of notes using tags alone. In contrast, in Evernote, tag nesting is for organizational purposes only. That means that tags must be unique, even when they are nested underneath other tags. 

So, let's imagine that you own two cars, and want to organize information about insurance and service records.

 

Bear

You can set up something like this in Bear:

car1/insurance

car1/servicerecords

car2/insurance

car2/servicerecords

You could then filter by car1, or car2, etc., or drill down. You could also potentially search by insurance, servicerecords, etc., and cross cut across car1, car2, etc. 

 

Evernote

In Evernote, you would need to do a workaround, as you can't create two tags with the same name. One workaround:

car1-insurance

car1-servicerecords

car2-insurance 

car2-servicerecords

etc., but you lose the information that the sub-string "insurance" is really supposed to "mean" the same thing for both car1 and car2. 

Or you could use completely independent tags car1, car2, insurance, servicerecords, etc., and then organize the tags into a hierarchy with all of the tags underneath a general cars tag. But then what if you also have, say, health insurance, and use the insurance tag for that? Or home owners insurance? It wouldn't make sense to put the insurance tag under cars, right? You might say that you could keep insurance as the high level tag and nest other tags like cars, home, health, underneath, but that causes its own problems. You might say, then, you could have organizational-only tags like ^INSURANCE or ^CARS, but then you end up organization-only tags and the ensuing messiness (with especially huge amounts of messiness on iOS, where there is no tag hierarchy at all). 

Or you might have two notebooks, Car1, and Car2, and use the insurance, servicerecords, etc., tags. This is pretty much what I do now, but the 250 notebook cap is always looming in the back of my mind. Plus , there's no clear place to put the insurance tag under, i.e. the tag nesting problem is still there because tags must be unique, even when they are nested. 

And for people who want to don't want this new fangled tag hierarchy, an option could be put into settings to enable / disable. 

Thoughts?

 

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16 minutes ago, jyc23 said:

You can set up something like this in Bear:

car1/insurance

car1/servicerecords

car2/insurance

car2/servicerecords

How would I tag a note relating to the car insurance company.  Would I tag the note with both  car1/insurance and car2/insurance?

Warning: In Evernote, the hierarchy feature only exists on the Mac/Windows/Web platforms.  My iPad only shows one flat list of tags

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2 minutes ago, DTLow said:

How would I tag a note relating to the car insurance company.  Would I tag the note with both  car1/insurance and car2/insurance

If you wanted to tag the insurance company itself, you could just tag it as "insurance" as well.

Or ... I imagine that the search function would let search for any tag / nested tag called "insurance", sort of mimicking the existing universal unique tagging that we have now. 

 

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18 hours ago, jyc23 said:

You could then filter by car1, or car2, etc., or drill down. You could also potentially search by insurance, servicerecords, etc., and cross cut across car1, car2, etc. 

You can have tags for car1, car2, insurance and servicerecords.  Search by car1 or car2 or insurance or servicerecords, add the other tag to the search as you like for the crosscuts.  Not exactly the same processes for sure, but same results in the end.  

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On 11/25/2017 at 5:53 PM, jyc23 said:

You can set up something like this in Bear:

car1/insurance

car1/servicerecords

car2/insurance

car2/servicerecords

This discussion has occurred before...

In Evernote, four tags: "car1", "car2", "insurance", and "servicerecords". Apply as needed. "Drilling down" is done by adding tags to your query/filter, though, not by clicking around in your tag list.

Note that in the Bear approach, you need to add 3 tags to add a new car: "car3", "car3/insurance", and "car3/servicerecords"; in Evernote, you only add one new tag ("car3").. After that, suppose you want to add a new category for all cars, say for payments. In Bear you need to add three new tags: "car1/payment", "car2/payment",  and"car3/payment". Evernote you add only one tag, "payment". OK, so now you have 9 tags (3 * 3), but in In Evernote you only have 6. If you want to rename an automobile category, you need to rename each and every tag that uses it in Bear: the Bear approach just doesn''t scale very well. I would never use this approach in Evernote, though some people have.

In the English language, we don't have distinct words for, say, differently colored balloons: "redballoon", "blueballoon", "magentaballoon", "skybluepinkballoon", etc., much less "bigredballoon", "smallblueballoon", etc.. We just say "big red balloon". This let's us use "big" and "red" in other contexts than describing balloons --  maybe you want to use these for cars as well.

The world can't be contained in a single hierarchy.

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I think Evernote's tagging is actually the best compromise of simplicity with functionality.  In jcy23's example, I would have 'Insurance' as a discreet tag.

I think Evernote should improve the UI for searching by tags, so jcy23 could more intuitively search for tag:Car1* AND tag:Insurance.  At present, adding tags is brilliant, you just start typing, and Evernote narrows down the list to those that start with those characters.  It would be great if searching could be that easy.  

As has been said, Evernote only supports hierarchical tags on the desktop.  What works well for me, on Mac and on iOS, is to SIMULATE a tag hierarchy with prefixes like 'Loc:' for locations, 'Org:' (for organisations).  So I have tags like 'Loc:France', 'Loc:UK', 'Loc:USA'.  I can search for TRAILING wildcards like tag:Loc:U* to bring up UK and USA.  But only on the Mac can the wildcard be embedded, like 'tag:*UK*'.  That's very powerful, and it should be on all platforms.

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3 hours ago, Wilf Forrow said:

It would be great if searching could be that easy.  

Using the tag search icon ScreenClip.png.89a19b8311e97c8b312c28b31be8fcab.png when Search information is displayed (Ctrl-F10 or use the view menu) works the same way.  Incremental tag selections are based upon previous tags selected.

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I don't use the so-called hierarchical tags that are in the Windows client, mainly because it's a global setting (I might use it if it could be applied ad hoc, say by adding a new term to the  search language or via a checkbox on the search panel), but also because I don't really organize my tags in any kind of special hierarchy, and some tags get used for different contexts (much like words do in human languages), but they can only exist in exactly one place in the tag tree. Maybe some constrained hierarchies might be workable, but not in the general case for me.

The only way to do this currently is by creating compound tags that carry their context around with them. Ugh...

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13 minutes ago, jefito said:

I don't use the so-called hierarchical tags that are in the Windows client

so-called ?????      The hierarchical database model mandates that each child record has only one parent, whereas each parent record can have one or more child records. 

The Tag database table seem to qualify 5a236e7793393_ScreenShot2017-12-02at19_23_06.png.936a9e85a5121b1fa722fc3e92c8f31c.png

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12 minutes ago, DTLow said:

so-called ?????      The hierarchical database model mandates that each child record has only one parent, whereas each parent record can have one or more child records. 

Sorry, that was a braino. So-called hierarchical tag searches. I don't know whether Evernote actually uses that term; their wording is "Automatically select child tags"

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I use tag nesting for structuring tags, not notes.  For example, the Accounts tag has all the tags for the different companies with which I have a relationship as children; credit, bank, utility, whatever.  I seldom have the left panel open and have only been adding a few tags a year for the last five years. My tags are simple and easy to remember since they represent what the note is about, Statement, for example.  I rarely have to search the tag tree for a tag, the Ctrl-Alt-T Ctrl-Shift-T drop downs work just fine. 

I really don't care where my data is stored per se, more how I get at it.  I have eight notebooks but since most of my searches are All Notes context, I suppose I could get by with four, INBOX, Scans, Synced, Local.  So tags followed by word search if need works well in my use case.  FWIW.

Not saying EN shouldn't add nested tags if they want, just meh for me.

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