Jump to content

Feature Request: Tag Inheritance


Recommended Posts

I have a hierarchical tag structure, and so far as I can tell, there's not much advantage to doing this, other than visual organization of the tags. 

 

I would like to request an option to create tag inheritance. When searching, this could produce search results for the specified tag, and all other tags below it, in it's tag hierarchy.

Link to comment

I have a hierarchical tag structure, and so far as I can tell, there's not much advantage to doing this, other than visual organization of the tags. 

 

I would like to request an option to create tag inheritance. When searching, this could produce search results for the specified tag, and all other tags below it, in it's tag hierarchy.

 

This has been requested before & discussed a lot on the board already.  It does not appear Evernote is inclined to do this.  Please search the board on the topic, if you're interested.

Link to comment
  • Level 5

Hierarchical tags - that would be a great feature in Evernote. The Evernote team will see your request.

Just imagine, save time and stay on top of your growing collection of notes by creating tag hierarchies that span from the general to the very specific,   but....

Since it is not possible currently to link all the children tags, I use a 3 character prefix to my tags. I have been using a 2 level hierarchical tag system. It has served me very well over the past couple years. I have a lot of tags and this system helps me remember them for easy use.

Example of parent and child tags:


Company

Com-Amazon
Com-Charter
Com-Target

 

To find all my monthly payments to Charter Communications, I search for tag:Com-Charter

To find all children (all companies), I could search for tag:Com-*

I have 3,107 notes that are tagged with a company name (tag:Com-*)

I have 23,905 notes that are not tagged with a company name (-tag:Com-*)

 

There are many tag variations using the Parent/Child structure. Here are few examples.


Family

Fam-JLB

Fam-DLB

Fam-BEB


Government

Gov-Federal

Gov-State

Gov-County

Gov-City


Insurance

Ins-Auto

Ins-Home

Ins-Life


Personal

Per-Anniversary

Per-Exercise

Per-Neighbor

Per-Vacation

 

Technology

Tech-Computer

Tech-Cord-Cutter

Tech-HowTo

Tech-Software
 

It is my experience that Evernote really shines when using a combination of  tags, well-structured consistent titles, and Evernote's search grammar. It almost always finds the appropriate notes I am looking for.

Link to comment
  • 4 weeks later...

I came to this topic searching for tags management.

I'd like to see this feature by choosing tags by its hierarchy either.

As I work with lots of tasks and project management, it would be nice to change the task status quickly.

Example of one hypothetical structure of tags:

Task - To Do

Task - Follow Up

Task - Completed

When I have completed the task, EN could allow me to change the "Task - To Do" with the "Task - Completed", without the need to add-another-tag-and-delete-the-old-one, but instead, only swapping the tags, with dragging or selecting inside that hierarchy of tag.

The same could happen with filtered "Task - To Do" notes, allowing me to change them altogether.

I believe this would bring more efficiency.

Thanks for reading.

Link to comment
  • 5 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

It also seems like the end result could also be achieved by adding a "relationship" feature. A "relationship" feature might allow a two-way connection between notes (based on internal object ID of note so note renaming doesn't mess up the linkage) -- think Jira links.

 

From what I can tell, a "relationship" feature would help achieve the same as tag-inheritance but enable even more usage-scenarios.

 

That being said, if tag search allowed regular expressions, we'd have the flexibility to come up with a hierarchical tag structure that would allow us to come up with our own strategies without adding too many features to evernote's core.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

It also seems like the end result could also be achieved by adding a "link" feature. A "link" feature might allow the following:

 

- Two-way link between notes (based on internal object ID of note so note renaming doesn't mess up the linkage) -- think Jira links.

- Note links based on tags (special tags that group notes with the same tag).

 

From what I can tell, a "link" feature would help achieve the same as tag-inheritance but enable even more usage-scenarios.

Maybe I'm not understanding quite what you're asking for, but:

 

Note links -- though not two-way -- already exist in Evernote.

 

Tags can already be used to group notes that have the same tag. If that sounds redundant, it pretty much is.

Link to comment

In LightRoom for example (a photo soft by Adobe), you have choices.

Each tag can be define to : be exported or not, and to export his parents or not.

A tag who is not exported can be defined as a real structural tag, it is only usefull for your tag organisation.

 

Anyway, tag-inheritance can be usefull is some case like localisation : US < Massachussets < Boston

In this case when you select Boston it will automatically include the 2 parents tags.

 

 

 

That being said, if tag search allowed regular expressions, we'd have the flexibility to come up with a hierarchical tag structure that would allow us to come up with our own strategies without adding too many features to evernote's core.

I'd be glad (altought I had never think yet what I'd do with ^^ ), it is really powerfull search tool.

Link to comment

Anyway, tag-inheritance can be usefull is some case like localisation : US < Massachussets < Boston

In this case when you select Boston it will automatically include the 2 parents tags.

 

 

After looking at your use-case, I've started to like the regex search better. This would allow you to define a tag like:

 

US[Massachussets][boston] (use whatever delimiters you like)

 

Then use a regex to find:

 

US[.*][boston] (find all notes regarding US cities called Boston regardless of state)

US[Oregon][.*] (find all notes regarding every city in Oregon)

 

NOTE: Keep in mind that the [ and ] would need to be escaped otherwise, you'd have to pick another delimiter (i.e. US::Massachussets::Boston).

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

Regular expression search and also full Boolean search are both fine ideas that have been suggested elsewhere, but also are not really what the original suggestion is all about, though they'd probably enhance that.  As it is, what's really topical here is the idea of adding tag hierarchy to search, that is, to be able to exploit the hierarchical structure of tags in search. This too has been suggested and discussed elsewhere. My idea has been to extend the search language to allow you to include subtags, say by using the syntax "+tag:MyTag". Implicitly, this search would act as if you had added the tag "MyTag" and all of its subtags (immediate or note) to the search criteria as an implicit OR clause (i.e., match on any of the tags so defined). Or a variant: use "+tag:MyTag" to denote a search on the tag and its immediate children, and "*tag:MyTag" to denote a search on the tag and all of its subtags, to any depth.

Link to comment
  • 4 months later...

Hi, I'm not sure if this feature is implemented yet, but it is hampering me in my research project. I don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but here goes. As far as I am aware, Evernote tag hierarchy's are just visual representations, with no underlying functionality of retrieval. The concept of hierarchy's i.e. children, parents, siblings etc. are a well understood concept in software development, and is not too difficult to implement. Thanks to my SD manager of 15+ years ago, we used Directed Asyclic Graphs to develop tree structures in mobile apps. See http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/22824/A-Model-to-Represent-Directed-Acyclic-Graphs-DAG-o for a similar explanation and implementation. From a UI perspective, one can either enable this function through Tools/Options/Tags tab, allowing the current option, i.e. don't show children, or to enable to show children when clicking on notes/Tags. From a tag browsing perspective, there should of course be the options to search or display tag siblings, parents or children. For now, even the basic option of a tag search to show children too (+tag:MyTag as outlined by previous post) or a simple option switch to display children when clicking on tags will be a great help, if it is not too much to ask. Thanx.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

This feature is not implemented yet, nor are any of the search/filter proposals. They may never be. If you want to use Evernote effectively for research, you'd need to find some other mechanism to express what you want to do (which you've not detailed).

Link to comment

Hi Jeff. As this specific feature would be critical for me, I'll attempt an honest explanation, however it won't be brief. The brief version is as the title of this thread requests namely to implement a "Feature Request: Tag Inheritance". The reason being that I wan't to "Organize my notes into a static structure based on tags". 

What I want to do is organise my Evernotes into some logical structure so that I can write a chapter, article etc about those particular notes. 
There are a number of discussions on this forum and elsewhere on how to organise one's notes, either according to tags or notebooks, and how to use Evernote in one's writing or research workflow. Because of its flexibility, Evernote allows one to capture almost anything. This flexibility is however also its downfall, in that it becomes difficult to organize a lot of things according to a specific structure. 

Let me explain. Even though it has powerful search features, I use the Tagging feature to provide a visual overview of notes, whereas the notes stacks only allow 2 levels, parent and child, but when selecting the parent stack, it displays all the notes in the parent and child stack. However, when one organizes Evernotes using tags, only the notes in the specific tag selected will display at any given time. So the feature should allow:

1. one to either right click on the tag, and select "display child notes OR View all sub-notes" instead of just the notes in the selected tag.<Image1.gif>, or 

2. do a query as indicated before to retrieve a parent and all children note for a particular tag e.g. +Tag:MyTags,  and/or 

3. have a new Tools/Options/Tags Tab with a flag set in to always/never display child notes, or a flag on each tag hierarchy as the ultimate solution. 

4. In reverse, one should be able to select the tag in a note (or right click), and Evernote should put the active or focus tag on the tag hierarchy on the left panel (if tags are visible), i.e. add Focus to the following list.. <Image2.gif>, i.e. keep the selected tag, and tag browser in sync.

Most things in life are structured, and most people like to structure things according to their needs. In Evernote, it is however very difficult to structure or pin things down, without the ability to sort or display notes according to one's own ordering. This is a necessary feature in order to develop an outline, a story, or of browsing one's notes according to one's tag structure e.g. Cooking-->Asian-->Chinese-->Noodles OR State-->County-->City-->Suburb--Restaurant-->Chinese--Noodles. Because the note itself contains the essential information that one is seeking, some of these tags could merely be placeholders to aid in organization, i.e. have no notes in them. Yet, one still needs to see the notes below them. 

The need is therefore as the title suggests for "Feature Request: Tag Inheritance" as well as per other discussions on this forum e.g. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/15173-shouldnt-selecting-a-parent-tag-search-child-tags/page-3 and https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/46901-feature-request-tag-inheritance/?locale=en and https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/50676-feature-suggestion-option-for-nested-tags-to-filter-by-parent-tag/. The need is so explicit, that one user developed an app around it called Taggy https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/taggy-for-evernote/id430517286 This workaround however significantly multiplies the number of tags in a note, making it very difficult to keep track of visually. 



"Imagine walking up to a bookshelf in your home." 

You are looking for say five books that you arranged according to your research.

Every time you get there however, your children have rearranged all your books, either according to date, date last read, title, author, subject or whatever.

"If you don’t know where the book sits, then you’ll try to recall the color of its spine, neighboring books, chronological placement, or any number of other attributes of the book until you find what you need." 

You may remember one or two titles of those that you sorted, but not all five. Evernote Search feature ain't gonna help here, not even Regular Expression searching. It's a bit like hitting a moving target.

In conclusion, without this feature of creating a suitable tags as placeholders for notes, in sequence, under a specific tag hierarchy, it becomes pretty much impossible to create a structured account of one's notes in Evernote, especially with a number of one to many relationships or even many-to-many relationships that tags could offer, and it necessitates leaving the Evernote environment (exporting notes) for another more writing/structuring-friendly environment such as Scrivener, which allows one to create a static version of one's notes, move notes around, and click on a parent folder to display all the child notes. In the short term, this is an annoyance, as one cannot easily round-trip ones notes this way and keep the metadata; and in the long term, it is a deal-breaker which will drive me to explore other alternatives. I hope I am still not barking up the wrong tree, and that someone EverNote(ices) this request and includes this feature in Evernote before my project due date.


Thanx for understanding.

Walter

P.S> If someone can let me know how to upload images to this forum, I'll upload the screenclips I made.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

Hi Jeff. As this specific feature would be critical for me, I'll attempt an honest explanation, however it won't be brief. The brief version is as the title of this thread requests namely to implement a "Feature Request: Tag Inheritance". The reason being that I wan't to "Organize my notes into a static structure based on tags". 

What I want to do is organise my Evernotes into some logical structure so that I can write a chapter, article etc about those particular notes. 

"Static structure" isn't something that Evernote does particularly well, nor, as best I can tell, does it try to. "Logical structure" may or may not mean the same thing as "static structure". To me, it doesn't. Logical structure means to that you can find/isolate a set of notes. Evernote tends to support this better via search/query, though browsing (tags, notebooks) is also possible (browsing works by filtering under the hood anyways),

 

As for the question posed by the original poster, I think that the use case is pretty well understood, and some relevant proposals advanced by users, but Evernote hasn't chosen to implement them. SImple as that.

 

There are a number of discussions on this forum and elsewhere on how to organise one's notes, either according to tags or notebooks, and how to use Evernote in one's writing or research workflow. Because of its flexibility, Evernote allows one to capture almost anything. This flexibility is however also its downfall, in that it becomes difficult to organize a lot of things according to a specific structure.

I don't see it as a downfall, because I rarely rely on a static structure. If I want to write about or collect information from a specific set of notes, I can do that by opening up a working note in a separate window, and then filtering to find the notes that I want to refer to, collecting my thoughts in the working note. You can even make a table of contents of the selected notes, and put it in your working note.

 

Let me explain. Even though it has powerful search features, I use the Tagging feature to provide a visual overview of notes, whereas the notes stacks only allow 2 levels, parent and child, but when selecting the parent stack, it displays all the notes in the parent and child stack. However, when one organizes Evernotes using tags, only the notes in the specific tag selected will display at any given time. So the feature should allow:

1. one to either right click on the tag, and select "display child notes OR View all sub-notes" instead of just the notes in the selected tag.<Image1.gif>, or 

2. do a query as indicated before to retrieve a parent and all children note for a particular tag e.g. +Tag:MyTags,  and/or 

3. have a new Tools/Options/Tags Tab with a flag set in to always/never display child notes, or a flag on each tag hierarchy as the ultimate solution. 

4. In reverse, one should be able to select the tag in a note (or right click), and Evernote should put the active or focus tag on the tag hierarchy on the left panel (if tags are visible), i.e. add Focus to the following list.. <Image2.gif>, i.e. keep the selected tag, and tag browser in sync.

It's best not to confuse the tag hierarchy with the stack/notebook "hierarchy". Two separate mechanisms, for separate purposes. Anyways:

1, 2: If the mechanism that I tend to call "semantic tags" (a search language facility whereby you could specify that notes with a specific tag plus tags that exist under that tag are matched) were implemented, you could have this

3: Hmm, seems a bit complicated (particularly the second part), but ok, I guess. Ripe for user confusion, though.

4: Not sure I see much utility in that; maybe an operation to locate the tag in the tree, but I wouldn't want to be the behavior that all the time

 

Most things in life are structured, and most people like to structure things according to their needs. In Evernote, it is however very difficult to structure or pin things down, without the ability to sort or display notes according to one's own ordering. This is a necessary feature in order to develop an outline, a story, or of browsing one's notes according to one's tag structure e.g. Cooking-->Asian-->Chinese-->Noodles OR State-->County-->City-->Suburb--Restaurant-->Chinese--Noodles. Because the note itself contains the essential information that one is seeking, some of these tags could merely be placeholders to aid in organization, i.e. have no notes in them. Yet, one still needs to see the notes below them.

"Most things in life are structured" : I don't know what that means. It's our usage of those things that causes us to seek structure, and there are many ways to express/enforce structure.

 

With respect to Evernote, the point about static vs. logical structure above applies. You might wonder why Google (unstructured, associative search) won the internet search wars, and Yahoo (structured hierarchy) pretty much lost (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/yahoo-killing-off-yahoo-after-20-years-of-hierarchical-organization/.) . That being said, there's nothing stopping you from building such a thing from tags; it's just going to work well in Evernote unless you implement one of the couple of schemes that people use:

* Use the explicit tag-name-reflects-hierarchy scheme (tags names like "USA-Maine-Portland" or "Music-Jazz-MilesDavis"), or

* Explicitly populate your notes with all of the appropriate subtags

 

The need is therefore as the title suggests for "Feature Request: Tag Inheritance" as well as per other discussions on this forum e.g. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/15173-shouldnt-selecting-a-parent-tag-search-child-tags/page-3 and https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/46901-feature-request-tag-inheritance/?locale=en and https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/50676-feature-suggestion-option-for-nested-tags-to-filter-by-parent-tag/. The need is so explicit, that one user developed an app around it called Taggy https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/taggy-for-evernote/id430517286 This workaround however significantly multiplies the number of tags in a note, making it very difficult to keep track of visually.

Developers tackle perceived needs or wishes, sometimes more or less successfully. *shrug*

 

Using Evernotes' analogy http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/02/04/evernote-search-gets-more-powerful-with-descriptive-search/

"Imagine walking up to a bookshelf in your home." 

You are looking for say five books that you arranged according to your research.

Every time you get there however, your children have rearranged all your books, either according to date, date last read, title, author, subject or whatever.

"If you don’t know where the book sits, then you’ll try to recall the color of its spine, neighboring books, chronological placement, or any number of other attributes of the book until you find what you need." 

You may remember one or two titles of those that you sorted, but not all five. Evernote Search feature ain't gonna help here, not even Regular Expression searching. It's a bit like hitting a moving target.

Analogies don't always map to reality; that's why they're analogies. Tags are categorizations that you apply to notes yourself; children don't come around and re-tag things. The target won't move unless you move it yourself.

 

In conclusion, without this feature of creating a suitable tags as placeholders for notes, in sequence, under a specific tag hierarchy, it becomes pretty much impossible to create a structured account of one's notes in Evernote, especially with a number of one to many relationships or even many-to-many relationships that tags could offer, and it necessitates leaving the Evernote environment (exporting notes) for another more writing/structuring-friendly environment such as Scrivener, which allows one to create a static version of one's notes, move notes around, and click on a parent folder to display all the child notes. In the short term, this is an annoyance, as one cannot easily round-trip ones notes this way and keep the metadata; and in the long term, it is a deal-breaker which will drive me to explore other alternatives. I hope I am still not barking up the wrong tree, and that someone EverNote(ices) this request and includes this feature in Evernote before my project due date.

The usual thing is this: if Evernote doesn't suit your needs today, then it probably won't tomorrow, in the absence of any specific announcements from Evernote, which are vanishingly rare. Again, Evernote has certainly seen and understood the request and its permutations, but haven't chosen to implement anything like it, for whatever reason. Hoping that they're going to finally see the light in time to make your project work just seems like wishful thinking in the extreme.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

Tag Inheritance would be great.  Notebooks, stacks, tags, carefully written titles, searching, and shortcuts provide good mechanisms for finding groups of notes.  However, I do miss true hierarchies that are available in other tools (those other tools obviously have other shortcomings or I wouldn't be using EN).

 

On the rant topic, I tend to agree the EN threads regarding tag inheritance, sub-notebooks, shared stacks, etc often get ugly.  The tone of the threads make it seem more of a ideological/religious issue than a technical issue (especially the early threads from several years ago).

 

Despite the fact that I wish EN would support true hierarchies, I make the best of what EN provides.  It is a great product.  I often introduce others to EN.  I support it by being a premium user.  But, I'll keep hoping they add support for hierarchies.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

In my attempt to adopting a new GTD methodology I have recently spent quite some time planning and setting up quite a few tags in structural order within Evernote.

 

As I was testing it all out I have, sadly, realised what is outlined in this thread. At first I couldn't believe this was the case, and that a parent tag does not list child tags (or that child tags does not inherit its parent), but alas, I notice that this apparently is a feature request that goes all the way back to 2008. It made me pull back my finger, which was hovering on the "Upgrade to Premium" button, as I now have to rethink the entire GTD strategy in my workflow, to see if EN really is the best tool for me.

 

For what it is worth I therefore also would like to do a +1 on this request.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

Workaround.  If you let the "parent" tag be a single character prefix to your tags, you can simulate a parent search.  For example, if you precede your GTD tags with !, then tag:!* will return all of the note with GTD tags.  That or the compound tag approach, GTD.tagname.  Same process tag:GTD* to get all of the tags.  FWIW.  Since inheritance is not likely coming soon, if at all.

Link to comment
  • 1 year later...
On 1/21/2015 at 7:41 AM, csihilling said:

Since inheritance is not likely coming soon, if at all.

This really strikes a negative chord with me. If Evernote is able to achieve their goal of a "100 year company," it's going to have to appeal to long time users that have built up gigantic note libraries. (Just imagine your note count after decades of use). Searching is going to be a real chore without powerful innovation. Thinking that features like boolean searches and inheritance "may not come at all" is just crazy.

They will come, or Evernote will fail.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, JW3 said:

This really strikes a negative chord with me. If Evernote is able to achieve their goal of a "100 year company," it's going to have to appeal to long time users that have built up gigantic note libraries. (Just imagine your note count after decades of use). Searching is going to be a real chore without powerful innovation. Thinking that features like boolean searches and inheritance "may not come at all" is just crazy.

They will come, or Evernote will fail.

The CEO who espoused the 100-year company vision is gone, so we can't really hold them to that (unless the new CEO has picked up the catchphrase), but even when he was here, Evernote did not seem especially keen on tweaking organizational tools like tags or notebooks. I think they were more interested in AI, which has the promise of making those decisions for you, or "surfacing" information when you need it.

I don't think that is what Evernote has ever been, or what it is likely to be in the future. They provide a blank campus with a few very powerful tools that can be manipulated in ingenious ways to produce some pretty nice results. At the end of the day, whatever is there now (as jefito said above) is likely to be all that we have in the future, and wishing for / hoping for / predicting new features probably won't end terribly well. 

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, JW3 said:

They will come, or Evernote will fail.

Could be,   I was just commenting on the length of time that the above two enhancements have been in request mode.  That and in the interim should not come at all be a reality there are workarounds.  Didn't mean to make bad music for anyone,

For my use case Inheritance doesn't make much difference, but I know it is important to others.  Most of my searches are compound tag as opposed to family tag.  OTOH, I would really like to see Boolean search.  30k notes and not hobbling me at this point, but again, my use case.

 

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

It's harder to implement this type of requests where the system has to change, as they have the potential to destroy the work process set up by existing users.

Me myselft would hate tag inheritance, as I don't try to use the hiearchy as a filter.

It I have set up my tags to be USA > Massachusetts > Boston
                                                        > Florida             > Miami

 

I don't want a click on USA to show me a bunch of notes about each state and each city in the US, I want it to show me notes about the federation. Or if it's the other way around, I don't want a click on Boston to give me search results about the federation.

There would be no way to reverse filter.

One thing I do have a HUGE problem with though, is that the later Evernote 4 versions had a function where if you searched for a tag and selected a tag from the returned search suggestions, the left panel would jump to that tag among the nested tags. You therefore had all your search results with the relevant tag in the main window on the right, and an instant overview of all the child tags to that tag on the left. When Evernote made the jump to v5, this feature was lost, and I considered this the most important feature ever implemented for my needs. I curse this bait and switch at regular intervals..

 

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
On February 9, 2016 at 0:18 PM, gustavgi said:

Me myselft would hate tag inheritance, as I don't try to use the hiearchy as a filter.

This is my feelings too. otoh Some of the pro-inheritance people seem rabid about that need for this feature.

Like you, I make use of it and tag notes where appropriate at the parent or child level, and am satisfied they are separate.

If I need to combine the child tags, I've used a naming structure that allows this is a search

Apology added: In using the term "rabid" I realize it could be viewed negatively.  My meaning was more towards "have strong feelings"

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...
  • Level 5*
On 2/9/2016 at 2:35 PM, DTLow said:

Some of the pro-inheritance people seem rabid about that need for this feature.

That's strange.  I haven't seen any rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth, mad dogs around here.  Or at least none of those who advocate tag inheritance.

There is nothing wrong with people being strong advocates for a feature they feel is important, whether it be tag inheritance, or zero-knowledge encryption.

On 2/9/2016 at 2:18 PM, gustavgi said:

Me myselft would hate tag inheritance, as I don't try to use the hiearchy as a filter.

I don't want a click on USA to show me a bunch of notes about each state and each city in the US, I want it to show me notes about the federation. Or if it's the other way around, I don't want a click on Boston to give me search results about the federation.

There would be no way to reverse filter.

Sure there is.

In the Tag Filter, they could simply add a checkbox for "Include Child Tags".
When clicking on a Tag in the Sidebar, they could provide an option for OPT-click, as well as make it a setting in Preferences.
In the Search box, they could allow for a "➕" if you wanted to include child tags, like this:
tag:USA+

So, Tag inheritance could be completely optional.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

I have gone through my tags and removed the hierarchy because I found it hard to remember where I had kept some items, and having multiple prefixes (or suffixes) for some tags meant that there were many "extra" tags that were unnecessary. The ability to filter by tag within the displayed context (notebook, or a single tag) makes this extremely powerful. However, I would like the ability sometimes to be able to see all notes tagged with "Fruit", but then exclude notes with "Banana" so that I can find all the notes that mention "Cramp" (if there are any for this particular example). The current filter by tag box does not allow me to do this. I know that the text searching allows me to have -tag:, but entering something in the text search box wipes the filter by tag selection. Also, it is so darned slow that I only use that as a last resort now.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
11 minutes ago, FactMan said:

I have gone through my tags and removed the hierarchy because I found it hard to remember where I had kept some items, and having multiple prefixes (or suffixes) for some tags meant that there were many "extra" tags that were unnecessary. The ability to filter by tag within the displayed context (notebook, or a single tag) makes this extremely powerful.  However, I would like the ability sometimes to be able to see all notes tagged with "Fruit", but then exclude notes with "Banana" . . .

I use tags for two different purposes:

  1. As organizational elements.  I call them pseudo Notebooks
  2. As cross-cutting categories

So, I have tag hierarchies associated with both.  Most of the time if I want to click on a tag in the Sidebar, it is from #1.  If it is a tag from #2, then I use either the Tag Filter, Search Box, Saved Searches, or Shortcuts.  So where the tags in #2 are located in a hierarchy don't really matter.

When I go to the Tag Filter, I just start typing the name of the tag, and it auto-completes, auto-suggests, and I pick the one I want.  So, again, the hierarchy doesn't matter there.

I definitely agree with you that it would be hugely powerful if the Tag Filter supported exclusion of tags.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
16 hours ago, FactMan said:

The current filter by tag box does not allow me to do this. I know that the text searching allows me to have -tag:, but entering something in the text search box wipes the filter by tag selection.

Not sure I'm following you completely, but if you have your search box set to Search current context you can go to the search box and enter text after tag selection   Jump to tags (Shitf-Alt-T), enter a couple of tags, and refine the search with text in the search bar works for me.  FWIW.

100% on board with a -tag capability in the tag filter box.  And if we are asking for things, being able to use the * wildcard would a nice addition as well.  ;)

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

Same here.  I was just saying you can keep the tag search in the tag filter bar and add a text search value in the search bar, in response to the earlier post.  So use the tag filter bar to enter fruit and then go to the search bar and add banana.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...