Tags: An alternative approach to folder-based categories

[wein-geist]

Hi all,

This was requested in #173, but not with a lot of detail, and I wanted to start a discussion of how it could look like.

Little bit of background: I was a Google Keep heavy-user, and in terms of my degooglifying efforts was looking for a self-hosted notes/tasks keeping app. I found Memos, liked many things about it, but think it is too minimalist for me and many things are lacking. So I have been using jotty now for a while, and I am already a huge fan.

BUT: The hierarchical tags of Memos are fantastic.

Short description:

• tags can be located anywhere in the note by writing #tagname, and multiple tags can be used.
• when beginning to write a tag, auto-completion suggestions pop up
• Tag-filters are created automatically, as soon as they are being used in notes
• Tags can be hierarchical. eg: write #homelab/jotty and they show up as nested tag filters in the side-bar:

• filtering by a parent tag also shows notes of all children tags

This has (in my opinion) some great advantages:

• aspects of life are not categories like drawers, but entangled and twisted. Putting a note in ONE category is often limiting. tags allow for organizing notes in different logical structures (e.g. topic, location, branch or different teams).
• I dont need to manually create categories and subcategories, but I can just use the tag and the "categories", i.e tag filters are created dynamically.
• archiving is as easy as prefixing your tag with #archive/..., that creates an archive where the organizational structure is preserved and is quickly accessible. this can also be used for other organization tasks, where a note is pushed into different "buckets" and the structure below should be preserved.

In terms of implementation:
Ditching categories and replacing it with tags is probably not the right way. I am sure many people love the status quo. Some people like to put stuff to a single drawer, and thats ok.
Maybe it could be switched by the admin, if the jotty instance is organized with tags or with folders. But this would be probably the biggest effort to implement.
Maybe there is a more sneaky way, of keeping the folder based categories, however allowing them to be used like tags.

• writing #category/subcategory assignes a note to the corresponding subcategory, creating it if it doesnt exist yest.
• writing multiple tags in one note are allowed and filtering for each of those categories shows the note.
• filtering for a parent category should also result all notes in the sub-categories (mentioned here in comments [FEATURE]: Automatic "index" for showing folder content on the right side #350)
• maybe each note has a kind of "native" category, that shows the note listed when browsing through the category/notes list, and is displayed at the bottom of the cards view and below the title, when opening a note. This would be an approach that is closer to the status quo.
• alternatively: the same note could show up in multiple "categories" when browsing the tree, and could have multiple "categories" listed in cards view and below the title. this could be confusing to users that think in terms of folders and maybe assigned multiple tags by accident.

But maybe the sneaky way is too confusing. Thats why I wanted to discuss this hear and hear your thoughts about it.

Cheers
weingeist

[fccview]

Yeah you see, I have been wanting to add tags for months, I just don't know how to make it fit in without disrupting what makes Jotty so appealing to me and hundreds of others.

What you are suggesting is super cool, but Jotty doesn't have a database, and tags end up being very computationally expensive when not indexed.

Imagine having 100 notes with tags in it, each page load would read the content of them all, categorising everything on the fly, all the time.

Now, the only way I see tags happening in Jotty is to have an array of tags in each note's frontmatter, on page load the site ONLY reads all the frontmatter and gives you a set of available tags with how many times they have been mentioned.

Replacing categories is a huge no for me, everything must work as it is. Everything we add must be a feature on top of what's there and must be optional, that has been the ethos I worked so far with and why it all still feels so simple (even tho it's not a simple app anymore)

Maybe the admin switch is the only way to do this without disrupting the current application. But even then, it'll 100% become a much slower experience with a big amount of notes, I can guarantee that.

I'll have a sneaky look at how memo does this, but I would be surprised if they don't use a database to index tags.

Sorry there are some seriously huge limitations in the "zero databases" claim lol

[fccview]

my take on tags :)

Not sure if this will see the light of day yet, but this is what it'd probably end up looking like and users can just disable tag support if they don't want it.

[fccview]

Hey!
Thank you so much for the feedback!!

A lot of these issues are fixed on the latest develop version (sorry) but I saw some issues that are likely still gonna be there..

I need to drive so l won't be able to work on things until evening :)

Just a note on your content(I'll go in depth later on), imported notes with tags WILL need you to go to settings -> content and update tags from there, should have mentioned that sorry.. this is due to the system only understanding tags within the yml frontmatter.

Sorry about it, because this is now on develop it will make it to next release and I am trying to get it as right as possible, so I spent all of yesterday fixing a lot of issues I found. Check the open pull request as it has the complete Changelog of what's gonna go live ♥️

[fccview]

Btw feel free to join the discord for faster communication ♥️

[fccview]

Hi!
Sorry for the multiple replies, different moments of the day lol

Just made a quick mock data generation script for easier local development/test and imported about 200 notes/checklists, refreshed the page and everything got imported correctly, nothing was corrupted and uuids got added properly (btw the extra bytes you see after importing notes are the frontmatter being added to each note on first load).

I then went to setting dashboard -> content -> Update Tags and it updated about 190 notes with tags, took about half a second, i'm actually impressed by my own work for once lol

I have not been able to break it in any way you have explained in your initial message, I wonder if these bugs are just due to the older version you have been testing on (as tags don't use that specific span anymore anyway, and i have improved the regex for tags detection).

I'm pushing yet another version and everything will be available once these ticks are green: https://github.com/fccview/jotty/actions/runs/21337234219

Planning to go live with this fairly soon, the release is getting a bit too big for comfort and the bigger the release the more potential for bugs as it gets out of hand with testing.

p.s. I just realised you advocated for the right side content view in #350 , I took your idea and expanded upon it a little, it's also available in the develop image you'll be testing!!

[wein-geist]

hey,

I found the update tags button, good to know.

I'll keep you posted, if the empty notes occur again. I observed it twice for different subsets of notes, when I unzipped them to two different category directories. And the original chatgpt files were ok, I checked them. But if it happens again on the newer releases, I'll notify you.

I would love to test the latest dev version, but help a noob out, please: whats the quickest way to update? I deployed using proxmox community script, so I guess with yarn? The last time, it used ChatGPT and took about 20 lines of copy pasting commands I did not really understand :D This cant be it.

[fccview]

hey,

I found the update tags button, good to know.

I'll keep you posted, if the empty notes occur again. I observed it twice for different subsets of notes, when I unzipped them to two different category directories. And the original chatgpt files were ok, I checked them. But if it happens again on the newer releases, I'll notify you.

I would love to test the latest dev version, but help a noob out, please: whats the quickest way to update? I deployed using proxmox community script, so I guess with yarn? The last time, it used ChatGPT and took about 20 lines of copy pasting commands I did not really understand :D This cant be it.

Oh I see..
Unfortunately I have no idea how to change version with the community script without being able to edit the script itself.
If you CAN edit the script, on line 44 replace this

CLEAN_INSTALL=1 fetch_and_deploy_gh_release "jotty" "fccview/jotty" "tarball" "latest" "/opt/jotty"

with this

CLEAN_INSTALL=1 fetch_and_deploy_gh_release "jotty" "fccview/jotty" "tarball" "develop" "/opt/jotty"

Not sure if it'll work, but it's worth a shot 😆
Soon enough the proxmox script will be very performant, I've worked with the guys there to use a very light release so it won't require all the resources it currently does to build :)

Otherwise the best way to test develop would be to pull the repository locally on the develop branch and run

yarn
yarn dev

ChatGPT would be able to guide you very quickly through the latter, that'll run it in development mode tho, so it'll be much slower than what you're used to tho

[fccview]

This is now live in https://github.com/fccview/jotty/releases/tag/1.19.0 ❤️
Please feel free to raise any bugs found in the latest version and I'll do my best to address them!

[wein-geist]

great to see this pace, I've updated already and will keep you posted if I find anything.

[smikwily]

Are there any plans to add Tags to Checklists?

I use checklists/kanban for tracking media for myself - I make lanes statuses/lanes for "to watch", "watching", "waiting", "completed". I use tags/labels to indicate if it is a movie, game, TV series and if it is something for just myself, to watch with my wife, as well as where I'm streaming it from, etc.

[fccview]

Hey, today I found another thing regarding the left panel, that I was not able to put my finger on, except for today. But this one feels more subjective, for that reason I want to discuss here, before raising a feature request.

I was really thankful that you implemented tags so fast, but somehow, I was not fully using them. I am not faster finding the note I am looking for with tags, and I think it is because they are a bit redundant to folders, the way they are implemented.

What do I mean? A file belongs to a folder, so it makes sense to list it under a folder. But thats not the case for tags, since many can be applied to the same file. Maybe it would be better if the tag overview just lists tags and subtags hierarchically, and when clicking any of them, it only updates the filter in the main windows, but does not list the notes below the tag. Thats what we have the categories for.

Maybe also a clearer indentation would already help with clearer overview of tags (see #406 )?

I frankly hate tags and I keep them disabled on my own instance, so I don't really mind if we change how it works 😆
But I tend to agree, maybe we just keep the tags without the notes underneath them, and clicking on the tag will just show all notes on the side.

It's just gonna be a pain to individually fix tags over categories for when you are on a note, at the moment it just toggles the item on the sidebar, for tag i'd need to redirect the user on the home page with the filtered tag on, bit of a overhead there, but can be done!

[fccview]

Yeah @wein-geist
I'm absolutely removing notes from underneath tags in the sidebar and allow clicking on tags from anywhere to load all notes within them on the right side of the screen.

This works so nicely on my local env and it actually makes way more sense!

[fccview]

Little update/sneak peek ❤️

[wein-geist]

So you moved it to its own category? good idea, this will separate it further from categories. and is way cleaner.

are tags then universal? so could they be used in notes and tasks as well?

[fccview]

So you moved it to its own category? good idea, this will separate it further from categories. and is way cleaner.

are tags then universal? so could they be used in notes and tasks as well?

Yes they will be universal, same tag for both, you can have #food and it'll tag both food shopping lists and recipes, it's actually more intuitive this way, it's a bit of a pain to make tags work well for checklists but I'm getting there