Tags vs. Folders

Can I ask for some brainstorming help. I of course see the value of tags, and I use them. I also, however, seem to have a brain that really likes to think in terms of folders. I can tell myself that the list of tags in the sidebar are “really” folders. But I’d like a few tags to have some visual clue that they are what I think of as folders: they identify top level projects (for me, these are research papers I’m working on) with notes pertaining to that project.

Sure, I might make reference (through a tag, I guess, or a wiki link) to a note in another project. But primarily I want these projects to appear as projects, to somehow distinguish them from the other collections of tagged notes that appear in the sidebar.

I hope this makes sense.

You can have subtags for any tag and basically create a folder hierarchy this way. And use the tagcons however you want.

I just realized that there’s not folder tagcon - missed opportunity?

Use hide sub tag notes from view - preview style - hide sub tag notes

You can use emoji in tags, and those sort to the top of the alphabetical tags list — you could use for example:

#📂 Stuff#

to get “:open_file_folder: Stuff” at the top.

Other emojis can be used as well for similar purposes.

(The two hashmarks allow spaces to be used in the tag. If you don’t care about that, you can leave out the spaces and the closing #.)

Ah, thanks for this. Great idea. Thanks to the others who offered suggestions too. In the meantime I have tried pinning the relevant highest level tags and assigning them icons (for now, just the numerals 1, 2, 3 from the Bear list of icons for tags). For my needs, this is pretty satisfactory. This (and your idea here) allows me to keep a small set of what look like “folders” or “projects” as well as the more complete tag list in the sidebar.

2 Likes