Distinguish between Tags, folders and hierarchy (and simple "supports tags" feature)

Comments: 7

• 30 Nov, '20
  Bill Admin

  This is interesting, but also a lot of heavy lifting to try to figure precisely how to describe all these designations. And I'm not sure exactly how this benefits a user ... aside from a user's existing perceptions of what they're used to, I think there's a case to be made that the current system does a fine job at capturing the emergent functionality a user should be after. That is, just because they're used to an app with "folders", I see no reason they shouldn't be equally open to a tags-based hierarchy, given that the tag organization provides a superset of folders.
  
  Do you think that breaking the organization into these various labels captures something of essence that is not captured via the existing subfeatures of "Note organization hierarchy"?

• 30 Nov, '20
  Lucian Admin

  Although I agree that current system captures good functionality to have in a notes app, I assume some apps we might index will not have any definitve way of organizing notes in a hierarchy, but instead they might only offer a one-level-deep folder/tag functionality. For apps such as these, it might be useful to know whether the taxonomy is tagging or folders.
  
  But an even more useful distinction I think we would gain from this would be to differentiate between apps that create hierarchies in a wiki-like fashion (with notes as nodes, see Notion) and apps that use metadata for note hierarchy (such as tags or encapsulating them in folders - see almost any other app).

• 30 Jan, '21
  Javelins

  Strongly agree with the need to break out tagging as its own feature. Note-level tagging has proven to be a make-or-break feature in my experience — I would happily pay $15 for Dropbox paper had they supported note-level tagging. I am also reconsidering notion for this reason as well.
  
  I agree that it should be distinguished from the folder hierarchy feature as it is far more powerful:
  1. It allows for content to be categorized across multiple verticals — this offers more flexibility and better maps onto how the brain stores information (when does anything neatly fall into a single category?)
  2. It serves both organizational AND search/filter functions where as a standard hierarchy only serves the former.

• 23 Feb, '21
  Ronak

  Excellent arguments made by Lucian. I am in favour of distinguishing between folder type and tag type hierarchy. Suprisingly NoteApps has "in-line tags" as a feature without having "tags" as a feature.

• 05 Jul, '21
  Kim Keyser

  @Bill: I consider both inline tags & nested tags a *must*. So yes, I do consider clear benefit of including them. The other criteria Lucian suggested are not essential for me in comparing apps, but might be good.

• 19 Aug, '21
  Bill Admin

  Added "Allows hierarchical tags" as a feature, with description that multiple tags must be supported.

• 23 Aug, '21
  Ronak

  Good update, but I would not consider this done. The update applies to tags, where as this suggestion post deals with separating tags / folders in feature list. As an example why this separation is important, OneNote allows nested folders, but not nested tags. On the other hand a note can have multiple tags applied to it but it cannot be in multiple folders. This information cannot currently ascertained from viewing the features of OneNote as both tags and folders are considered when determining whether OneNote has a feature.