Is there anything in the plans to enable the Archive list to display the notes in the same “tag” structure as the regular list? I would like to use this feature more but being in a straight list is a little difficult to navigate.
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This isn’t planned at the moment. The archive is meant to be a place for notes you don’t want to see but also don’t want to delete.
If you find yourself needing to browse the archive often, it might be a sign that something’s off. Aside from the occasional search to recover or restore an old note, the archive really isn’t meant to be regularly navigated.
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My most important wish for Bear is at the moment the division of the Bear notes in workspaces.
Separate workspaces for bussiness, private and others, each workspace with its own tag structure and syncing.
The Archive could be a seperate workspace, with a tag structure.
@matteo I hope the devs will consider workspaces.
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I don’t entirely agree with this perspective about the Archive. I’d really like to use Bear’s Archive feature more, but the loss of any organizational structure once a note lands in it makes it pretty useless to me. I don’t expect to regularly navigate the Archive, but when I do, it would be far more useful to me to be able to browse it using the same organizational system I’ve created.
As a workaround, I’ve had to create a dedicated “Archive” top-level tag. Any note which I archive has its own tag(s) prepended with “Archive/“ (effectively moving that note “into” the Archive tag). The downside of this is that there’s no drag-and-drop method to accomplish this (dragging a note the “Archive“ tag would only add that tag to the note). Also, all the notes my “Archive” show up in the universal search. Whereas if there were in the Bear Archive, they wouldn’t clutter my search results.
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There are many systems like PARA, for example, that have a folder called archiv. This folder has nothing to do with the functionality of the archive folder in bear, apart from the fact that both have the same name, which can lead to confusion. I am not sure if I have understood you correctly: You have the problem that - if you tag your notes with a tag called “archive” - these notes will still remain visible in other tags? And if you were to remove these tags from the notes, would they be lost when you “retrieve” the notes from the archive? But that is the crucial difference in the logic of tags and folders. A note can only appear in a single folder, but can contain several tags at the same time.
A good and reasonable solution I can see is to enable a better search using tags within the notes list. It has already been requested by several users in other contexts and for other reasons, for example in such a way that the autocomplete field appears when tags are entered. So you could filter the notes list of bears archive location more easily by tags.
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It’s interesting that you mention PARA. This is exactly the system I’m using (or at least a derivate of it).
I think this is where we start to see things a bit differently. Personally, I believe Bear’s Archive feature could be a natural fit for the “Archive” location within the PARA system. The point of the “Archive” in that system is where notes go into “cold storage” after, for example, when a project has been completed.
Well not exactly. What I’m doing now is to prepend ALL of that note’s tags with “Archive/“ … this effectively “moves” all that note’s tags into the Archive tag. That’s the only way I can create a browsable archive of my archived notes. Unfortunately this has several drawbacks:
- I have to manually rename each of that note’s tags (vs. just dragging and dropping into Bear’s Archive).
- The notes in that top-level Archive tag still appear in global searches (notes in Bear’s Archive are excluded from global searches).
- Maybe not ALL tags should be renamed (such as a person’s name).
In summary: Dragging the note into Bear’s Archive is LOT easier than renaming each tag by hand. It even preserves all the original tags, should I ever restore the note. However, it critically loses the “browse-ability” aspect.
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I share a similar pain point, though slightly different. I’ve always wanted the Archive to have its own tag list featuring any tags found in it.
This would allow me to visit the Archive and see a tag like #2023 Taxes# and find all notes related to it.
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I thought this was exactly what we were discussing here … for the Archive area to display the tag structure of its contents.
I always felt the most-elegant solution would be to make the Archive expandable with a tool like in this quickly-hacked-together mockup:
It would obviously be collapsed by default.
Ah, yes. Sorry I could have misunderstood the OP.
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