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crane

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crane last won the day on May 3 2020

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  1. Following the GTD philosophy, I've always found that Evernote was more suited to being my reference system, not my contexts. In other words, I don't think of it as my "todo list", but rather a kick-butt filing cabinet.
  2. Just bear in mind that the hierarchy you see on the screen has no meaning. For example, if you have a tag hierarchy like this: -location ...-paris ...-rome ...-sydney You're good if you just want to see the notes from paris - you could do a search like tag:paris. But if you want to see all travel notes, you cannot do tag:location, because that will just find you the notes in the location tag, not in any of its children. There is no automatic way to get a note categorized with its parent or child tags either. I can't remember who, but someone on the board has a good system for dealing with this lack of semantics in the tag hierarchy by naming his tags like this: -location ...-location.paris ...-loation.rome ...-location.sydney Then, you could search for tag:location.paris or tag:location.* and find either paris or all travel notes. It's a good hack, but it's ugly, and it requires you to remember how you named stuff. I try it for a couple of my tags, but it hasn't really caught on for me yet.
  3. Welcome to the board. If you do any searching through the forum, you'll find several discussions on this topic, e.g., subnotebooks, hierarchy of notebooks, etc. etc. Bottom line: several of us have asked for it quite vehemently. And have been told in no uncertain terms "no, use the damn tags", or something to that effect. If you can't deal with a flat (alphabetical) list of notebooks, you'd be better off finding another product. Sigh.
  4. I'll admit that I don't always get what I ask for here, but hey, I realize that I'm only one of many. There may be a few threads that seem to fall through the cracks (but that's because we can't get what we want), but to say that EN doesn't reply to users...well, ffffflpppppbbbtttt.
  5. I have to respectfully disagree. A note can only be in ONE notebook, hence the notebook is a container. If a notebook were a tag, you could have a note in several notebooks.
  6. Yeah, I think it's back to the whole discussion about power users. A lot of people can just use EN right out of the box to collect miscellaneous *****. But there's a few power users out there who try to make it really work hard, e.g., serious searches (a la old category intersection), no-think tagging so you can have a trusted system, templates (oh, how power users miss templates), etc.
  7. Crispinb, you've hit the nail on the head when you say that "organizing" is a different problem than "searching". I've been trying to use EN3 to hold all my notes from my new job. I'm in week #4 now, and I've come to the conclusion that EN3 is just untenable as a real notebook for me. Sure, it's great for absorbing a bunch of stuff that I send to it, and I surely do love the fact that I can use a shortcut key anyway to clip some stuff to it. But I've been trying for 3 weeks now to figure out how to organize the stuff I've collected. So far I've only 400 notes related to work. I've tried different notebooks. I've tried one notebook with many tags. I've tried different organization of tags. I'm to the point where I have a set of tags that start with numbers, e.g., 001 Learn X, 002 Learn Y, etc. and have everything in one notebook. This requires me to, at the end of every day, look at ever untagged note and decide where (what project, really) it belongs. But then when it comes to finding that "thing" I'm looking for, e.g., a note that I know I'm going to have to keep coming back to, I got frustrated. I created a Help tag, to hold all those special notes. To be honest, I find tagging a pain. I often forget to tag stuff, which makes the tags meaningless. It was to the point where I was writing down the really important stuff in a notebook, for easy access. But then I started working on projects, and I want to keep project information together - useful URLs, documents that have been sent to me by email, my notes from meetings, etc. etc. Argh. EN was just not cutting it. So, my new system, newly minted, is a combination of EN3 for instant dumping / easy searching for things I *might* need in the future. For actually organizing, e.g., project notes, pieces of info I'm going to refer to over and over, I've started a tiddlywiki. I always avoided them in the past, because of the pain of dealing with screenshots. But to be honest, although I take may screenshots while working through something, only a few ever need to be referred to again, and EN makes it easy to save an image to my hard drive. Then, I just link to it from the tiddlywiki. I was resistant to trying this out, but then I found myself about to create a web page to organize my URLs, because I have so many and the bookmarks in FF just wasn't doing it for me. Long story short, my EN is now a giant container, like a sieve. Most stuff stays in EN, but some stuff, the really important stuff that I know I'll need for projects, gets brought into my TiddlyWiki. The wiki can be organized as I see fit, just like an interlinked set of web pages or notes. I get the advantage of choosing the order in which info is shown, I can link between notes (tiddlers) and I can link to files on my computer. It seems to be the best of both worlds for now.
  8. At least from my point of view, I'm arguing for subnotebooks because of the functionality that used to exist in 2.2. There, *categories* were the only form of organization, and yet they could be used either as *folders* or as *tags*. There were many long philosophical discussions about what a category really meant, and I think that forced the EN team to scrap the concept and separate the two concerns. Hence, we now have notebooks, which act as folders or containers, and tags, which act, well, like tags. I see tags as something *extra* that I tag my notes with, kind of like sticking tape flags on certain pages in a physical notebook. If I were just clipping miscellaneous bits of information, e.g., a favourite link, a recipe, a tip, etc., then tags would probably be enough - kind of like the del.icio.us concept. However, I use EN for much more than just snippets. I tend to log my thought process in there, e.g., how I'm going about fixing a problem, how I'm researching a particular thing, etc. etc. In the real world, I would have a physical notebook, with sequential notes showing the whole process. I could then tag/flag various bits for easy retrieval later. Most of these notes belong in one place, e.g., Research Problem X. For me at least, the ability to have notebooks/subnotebooks would fit my work flow much better. That's not to say that I don't use tags, but I find them to be an extra step that is only useful when something really important needs to be noted. You hit the nail on the head with the comment about being able to select a tag and have new notes automatically tagged. If that were the case, I would treat tags the same way I treated categories in 2.2. Alas, tags can only be assigned after the fact, and that's an extra step I'm not willing to take for most of my notes. Hopes this helps explain the rationale behind my request for subnotebooks
  9. As yet, we haven't been presented with a reason why we can't have both. Every time a user asks for subnotebooks, EN comes back with "use tags". We're not asking to remove tags, we just want subnotebooks as well.
  10. In EN2.2, we have categories. They are a combination of notebooks, tags, attributes, and saved searches. You can have an entire hierarchy, and any one category could be made to filter (e.g., filter by type of note, creation date, containing text, etc.). Or, it could just be "dumb" without any special autocategorization. There have been many long philosophical discussions on this forum as to what a category really was. Was it a tag, like del.icio.us? Was it a folder, like windows? Some of us liked it one way, some another, and some combined both methodologies without even thinking about it. Knowing these philosophical arguments, you can see why the new EN3 has separated out the four types now. Notebooks are like folders - a note can belong in any one folder. Tags are like del.icio.us tags; a note can have multiple tags. (We got a tag hierarchy because we begged for it, but unfortunately, it's not as powerful as the old category hierarchy from 2.2). Attributes are simply the auto-categories that could be created based on note type/format. And saved searches replace our regular autocategories, i.e., the categories that were automatically assigned based on something in the note. Of course, the new saved searches are much more powerful. But also limited, in that they stand by themselves, are stored in a flat alphabetical list, and are limited to a max of 32. The current mantra is that to achieve the concept of folders/subfolders in EN3, you should just use tags, because they come with a hierarchy. I say this is not an optimal solution because: 1. I can automatically create a note in a particular notebook. I can (no longer) create a note in a new tag. I have to create the note, and then tag it. (Plus/minus any moving to the appropriate notebook). 2. If I have a tag and two subtags, there is no way for me to see all notes that are in the hierarchy. In 2.2, I could double-click on the tag, and it (and all of its children) were selected, with an OR, i.e., I would have the notes that were in the tag, OR in either of its children. This can still be achieved, but by a manual search, i.e., "any: tag:mytag tag:mytagchild1 tag:mytag2". Ugly and painful. One could argue, well make a saved search. See my discussion about how they're limited.
  11. I'm using the notebooks the same way I used many categories in EN2.2, as "holders", as opposed to tags/attributes. For instance, I dump recipes into the Recipes notebook, Tips into the Tips notebook, etc. etc. What I'd like to be able to do is have subnotebooks so that I can have say Tips:Latex, Tips:Linux, Tips:Windows as subnotebooks on Tips. Yes, I can painfully accomplish the same thing with tags, but it's clunky for a couple of reasons: 1. When I want to mark a note as a Tips/Linux note, I have to: (a) move it to the Tips notebook and then ( tag it with Linux to distinguish it from other tips notes. If I had a separate notebook for Linux, I could just drag the note to that notebook and be done - half as much work. However, I've already got 13 notebooks - adding that many more will make the list unwieldy. 2. One of the joys of clipping to the web version is the ability to pick the destination notebook. Easy, quick, done. (Yes, I can tag there too - but I'd have to remember all my tags then.) Basically, I find the current tag implementation unwieldy. And frankly, useless. I can't easily select multiple tags, e.g., by clicking on their parent (a la 2.2), so the hierarchy is, well, frankly, completely meaningless. I'm trying to adapt to using it, but it's kind of a square peg/round hole argument. In addition, I find the saved searches to be pretty much useless for me too. Because I can't organize them in a hierarchy; and because they're not combined with the tag list, and because I can only have 32, I don't see the point in using them. What this means is that the only left-panel part of EN3 that I find useful at all is the notebooks concept. Unfortunately, they're a flat list, sorted alphabetically. This means that I've actually changed the kind of data I store in EN3. I don't keep anything "important" there, just scraps that I can dump into a notebook willy-nilly.
  12. Has the fact that several of us have asked for subnotebooks been noted as a feature request? Will it be possible in the future? Personally, subnotebooks will be much more useful to me than the tag hierarchy.
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