Feature Request: Settings option to make tags specific to particular notebook

[Sardo_Numpsa 0]

Hi, 

 

I have seen the question asked but no feature request. It would be awesome if there was a flag to make it so that tags created under a notebook will only be displayed when that notebook is selected and not when others are selected. 

 

From what I read there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea, but if it is a flag in the user preferences you would have the choice if you wanted to use it or not, and I am sure a lot of people would find it useful. 

 

I understand the idea that a tag should return everything across all notebooks, but I have got to the stage where I have so many tags that it has become unwieldy and counterproductive, and in my case 95% of tags are only relevant to a specific notebook anyway  I have seen some people suggest just not using tags but I think that's would be a shame as it is a useful feature. 

 

Those are my thoughts, please consider implementing this it would be extremely useful and transform my Evernote experience. 

[gazumped 11,664]

I'd agree that tags need to be looked at - we could certainly do with better management facilities so you don't lose track of multiple tags when you have a large supply of them.  However the immediate practical problem would be:  what about the millions of users how are happy with the current situation (or are at least living with it) and those,  like some of my colleagues - and me,  currently -  who don't use tags at all?  I suspect any change is much more likely to offend users than no change at all..

[Sardo_Numpsa 0]

I'd agree that tags need to be looked at - we could certainly do with better management facilities so you don't lose track of multiple tags when you have a large supply of them.  However the immediate practical problem would be:  what about the millions of users how are happy with the current situation (or are at least living with it) and those,  like some of my colleagues - and me,  currently -  who don't use tags at all?  I suspect any change is much more likely to offend users than no change at all..

 

I agree that this could upset existing users, which is why I suggested it be a flag in the preferences/settings, so if you don't like the new feature don't use it, it would be turned off by default so business as usual. On the other hand if you want a bit more order in your notebooks just tick the new checkbox and Bob's your fathers brother, notebook specific tags.

 

The tricky bit would be what to do with existing tags once the user decides to use the feature. I suggest all existing tags are assigned to all notebooks (i.e. a copy of the tag is created for each notebook) and going forward new tags to the relevant notebook.

 

While I am at it....when is Evernote for Linux going to make an appearance, Nixnote just isn't the same.. 

 

Edit: Just read the Linux thread, it's not going to happen, how sad. 

[Sardo_Numpsa 0]

Or have two type of tags, notebook specific and universal tags. These could be colour coded to differentiate them.

 

I'm wasting my time arn't I, it's never going to happen.

[jefito 5,589]

I have seen the question asked but no feature request.

In general, something like that would probably be taken as a feature request anyways if it was the main subject of a topic.

It would be awesome if there was a flag to make it so that tags created under a notebook will only be displayed when that notebook is selected and not when others are selected.

One correction. There's no such thing as a tag created under a notebook. Tags are wholly independent of notebooks, and can be applied to any note in your account. This is generally taken to be a Good Thing, since it makes more flexible organization schemes possible in Evernote.

On the separate topic of displaying tags when a notebook is selected, I think that the UI should have better ways of portraying that. The 4.x Windows clients were explicit about that in the tag tree; the 5.x series dropped that, but you can get a list (not a tree) of tags available in a notebook by using the search control that's at the head of the note list: select a notebook in the notebook selector at the left, and then click on the tag icon on the right, and a dropdown list of available tags should appear. Initially that list will contain all of your tags, but click elsewhere in the control, and the list will disappear, and the text "Click to filter by tag..." should appear. Click on that, and a list of tags, appropriate to the selected notebook, should appear. Select one, and the note list will of course be filtered by that tag, you should get a new "Click to filter by tag...", and if you click that, you should nw see a list of tags that's appropriate to the current filtered note list. And so on. This is kind of awkward, and has the feel of a work-in-progress, but it generally works.

From what I read there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea, but if it is a flag in the user preferences you would have the choice if you wanted to use it or not, and I am sure a lot of people would find it useful.

In general, the Evernote clients don't use a lot of special flags for special behaviors. I think that the UI could still use more work.

 

I understand the idea that a tag should return everything across all notebooks, but I have got to the stage where I have so many tags that it has become unwieldy and counterproductive, and in my case 95% of tags are only relevant to a specific notebook anyway  I have seen some people suggest just not using tags but I think that's would be a shame as it is a useful feature.

Tag organization is a topic unto itself. I consciously use few notebooks, and tend to create only general tags that can be applied anywhere, in combination with others. I don't have a lot of tags, so it's not hard to remember what they are. Simple tags plus a little text search generally serve well at isolating a small set of notes that make finding the one(s) that I want easy, but everyone's use case is different. My idea is to keep things as simple as possible, and spend more time with my notes than fussing with their organization. I used to sum it up like "Use notebooks where you must (sharing, local notebooks, offline notebooks) and use tags for everything else", but I think it's actually closer to "Use notebooks where you must (sharing, local notebooks, offline notebooks) and use tags when you need persistent organization, and use text search for everything else".

[Sardo_Numpsa 0]

 

I have seen the question asked but no feature request.

In general, something like that would probably be taken as a feature request anyways if it was the main subject of a topic.

It would be awesome if there was a flag to make it so that tags created under a notebook will only be displayed when that notebook is selected and not when others are selected.

One correction. There's no such thing as a tag created under a notebook. Tags are wholly independent of notebooks, and can be applied to any note in your account. This is generally taken to be a Good Thing, since it makes more flexible organization schemes possible in Evernote.

On the separate topic of displaying tags when a notebook is selected, I think that the UI should have better ways of portraying that. The 4.x Windows clients were explicit about that in the tag tree; the 5.x series dropped that, but you can get a list (not a tree) of tags available in a notebook by using the search control that's at the head of the note list: select a notebook in the notebook selector at the left, and then click on the tag icon on the right, and a dropdown list of available tags should appear. Initially that list will contain all of your tags, but click elsewhere in the control, and the list will disappear, and the text "Click to filter by tag..." should appear. Click on that, and a list of tags, appropriate to the selected notebook, should appear. Select one, and the note list will of course be filtered by that tag, you should get a new "Click to filter by tag...", and if you click that, you should nw see a list of tags that's appropriate to the current filtered note list. And so on. This is kind of awkward, and has the feel of a work-in-progress, but it generally works.

From what I read there was quite a lot of resistance to the idea, but if it is a flag in the user preferences you would have the choice if you wanted to use it or not, and I am sure a lot of people would find it useful.

In general, the Evernote clients don't use a lot of special flags for special behaviors. I think that the UI could still use more work.

 

I understand the idea that a tag should return everything across all notebooks, but I have got to the stage where I have so many tags that it has become unwieldy and counterproductive, and in my case 95% of tags are only relevant to a specific notebook anyway  I have seen some people suggest just not using tags but I think that's would be a shame as it is a useful feature.

Tag organization is a topic unto itself. I consciously use few notebooks, and tend to create only general tags that can be applied anywhere, in combination with others. I don't have a lot of tags, so it's not hard to remember what they are. Simple tags plus a little text search generally serve well at isolating a small set of notes that make finding the one(s) that I want easy, but everyone's use case is different. My idea is to keep things as simple as possible, and spend more time with my notes than fussing with their organization. I used to sum it up like "Use notebooks where you must (sharing, local notebooks, offline notebooks) and use tags for everything else", but I think it's actually closer to "Use notebooks where you must (sharing, local notebooks, offline notebooks) and use tags when you need persistent organization, and use text search for everything else".

 

 

I know there is no such thing as a tag created under a notebook, that is my point, it would great to have them, but by the sounds of it I will have to use your approach of using fewer, more general tags. Personally I think that's a pity.

 

Thanks for the feedback. 

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I know there is no such thing as a tag created under a notebook, that is my point, it would great to have them, but by the sounds of it I will have to use your approach of using fewer, more general tags. Personally I think that's a pity.

 

Relegating tags to notebooks would pretty much defeat the power & flexibility of Evernote.

[Sardo_Numpsa 0]

 

I know there is no such thing as a tag created under a notebook, that is my point, it would great to have them, but by the sounds of it I will have to use your approach of using fewer, more general tags. Personally I think that's a pity.

 

Relegating tags to notebooks would pretty much defeat the power & flexibility of Evernote.

 

 

Surely having the choice to do either, or both, would increase the power and flexibility of Evernote. I wasn't advocating "relegation" if you read my proposal. 

 

Well that's my 5 posts for today and clearly I am flossing a dead horse on this subject anyway so I will drop it.

[lisec 283]

I was looking for the same functionality, and I found the the way to do it. It is probably a bug, I don't know, but it works.

 

1. Select a notebook in the drop-down.

2. Click the "tag" icon. This will display all your tags.

3. Now click on the tag bar that has just appeared, and the tags displayed here will only be the tags relevant to the notebook.

 

In other words, once the "click to filter by tag" box has been activated, only relevant tags are displayed.

 

See image here:

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By4O12gwJk0iNy1NaU1LWGtXZTg/edit?usp=sharing

[jefito 5,589]

I was looking for the same functionality, and I found the the way to do it. It is probably a bug, I don't know, but it works.

 

Pretty sure that the original poster was looking for a way to force a tag to be usable only in a particular notebook, rather than a way to find only the tags that are used in a particular notebook. That's a good tip, and one a lot of people don't know about (I've posted that tip myself), but I don't think it's quite applicable to the context.

[attewalkers@gmail.com 0]

+1

[daden2 0]

The idea of having two kinds of tags is great: global (the existing ones) and notebook-specific tags. 

It keeps the good uses of current tags while allowing you to make tags that only relate to a specific notebook which can be very valuable. This is particularly useful when it comes to shared notebooks. I'm collaborating with someone on a subject and we're using tags to organize the data in the shared notebook. Those tags have no real use in my non-shared other notebooks but are needed in the shared notebook. 

Not being able to distinguish them makes it harder for me to manage my tags which I'd like to clean up but they have shared tags mixed in. 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, daden2 said:

Not being able to distinguish them makes it harder for me to manage my tags which I'd like to clean up but they have shared tags mixed in. 

My personal tags are stored under parent tags (?Who, !What  @Where  .When) and all have the same prefix as the parent tag (Mac device/platform)

It makes it easy to identify the shared tags

[jefito 5,589]

Moving to a feature request forum, where it can be voted on...