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.
Idea
jyc23 36
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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