Tag hierarchy: How can I find/search for notes which have common parent tag?

[Maddhin 25]

Hi,

I nest tags in logical hierarchies but recently found out that I can still only search for the specific tag. But what I want is to search for the parent tag and then get presented all notes which include this tag as well as tags which are nested underneath that parent tag.

For example: I have a tag "country" as parent tag and "USA", "Spain", "France" as sub-tags. I now tag a few notes with USA, Spain or France but not with "Country". If I now search for tag:country, I want to find all notes which has "country" or ANY of the 3 sub-tags "USA", "Spain", "France".

Possible? Workaround?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Eldorado 26]

This is possible only in interactive mode: If You click on "country", EN expands the search phrase to "any: tag:country tag:usa" a.s.o. :-(
EN should "know" that "country" is a parent tag so that tag:country implies "any: tag:<all-subs>".

As a workaround You may

• display search information (Ctrl-F10)
• click on the parent tag
• Rclick within the search information window
  • and select "Save Search..."
• Give Your saved search a suitable name and pin it to Your shortcuts

 

[Maddhin 25]

10 minutes ago, Eldorado said:

This is possible only in interactive mode: If You click on "country", EN expands the search phrase to "any: tag:country tag:usa" a.s.o. ?
EN should "know" that "country" is a parent tag so that tag:country implies "any: tag:<all-subs>".

As a workaround You may

• display search information (Ctrl-F10)
• click on the parent tag
• Rclick within the search information window
  • and select "Save Search..."
• Give Your saved search a suitable name and pin it to Your shortcuts

 

Cheers, @Eldorado! That is a valuable tipp and already helps me! Although the "tag browser" is usually not part of my workflow - I primarily work with "master notes" w/ links and notebooks and was looking for an option to e.g. show all notes related to a parent tag etc. by shift+tag clicking - just to find that this really only shows notes tagged with that tag...

[RY27 21]

You can also try a service called Filterize. It’s a freemium service, where one of the fully free features is that you can set each child tag to automatically inherit its parent tags. You can also do other neat things with it, such as automatic TOC and various tagging, reminder options. 

[DTLow 5,736]

7 hours ago, Maddhin said:

I nest tags in logical hierarchies but recently found out that I can still only search for the specific tag. But what I want is to search for the parent tag and then get presented all notes which include this tag as well as tags which are nested underneath that parent tag.

Child tag search is an option on the Windows platform, and a Mac scripting solution is presented here

I also use a repeated-prefix naming standard
For example 
     Country
          Country-USA
           Country-Spain
           Country-France

This allows child tag selection using wildcards; for example search tag:Country*
- bypasses the Tag Hierarchy that's only available on select menus on select platforms
- tags sort more logically in alphabetic sequence

 

[jefito 5,589]

On 7/18/2018 at 5:14 AM, Eldorado said:

This is possible only in interactive mode: If You click on "country", EN expands the search phrase to "any: tag:country tag:usa" a.s.o. ?

Further: this behavior only applies if the [] Automatically select child tags option in Tools / Options / Navigation is enabled, and you select tags for your search by selecting in the left panel or the Tag Picker; see the details in the hover text for that item.

This is kind of a clever hack that, as you imply, turns your search into an any: search with the subtags added. Downsides: it's a global setting, and I don't always often want that behavior. It would be loads better if the search language were extended to search subtags, maybe something along the lines of +tag:MyTag (only include next level of subtags) or *tag:MyTag (include all subtags, however deeply nested).

In my case, it turns out that I don't need this, but maybe my use of Evernote tags would change if the search language supported it. I refuse to use the <tag-name>-<subtag1>, <tag-name>-<subtag2>, <tag-name>-<subtag3>, etc system. Too much work and makes the tag names too long. But I know that some folks do this.

[Maddhin 25]

guys, thank you so much for the tips here, this really helped me. It didn't solve the problem per se but it helped working with EN's limitations - and possibilities as I haven't really worked with the tag browser much so far. I will have to see how things work on a day-to-day basis.

Filterize is actually interesting - the only things is really that one has to rely on this 3rd party tool...

+1 on better search language for tags.