Assigned tags should be included as searchable text 🔎

Issues
1

Hey,

tags are super useful to add related search keywords to a note that might not come up in the notes title or body text. For example, my German note might be tagged with grammar, spelling, style, writing.
Sadly the assigned tags are not included in the default search (not using the tag: ... syntax), so a search for “writing” won’t return the note. That feature would be a game changer for me.

As always, thank you for this beautiful application
Bastian

2

Hi Bastian,

Thank you for the suggestion.
Yeah, that sounds useful so you don’t have to type tag:... every time.
However, I actually don’t know if it works for everyone because I’ve never thought that I want tags to be automatically included like that.
Because when I search notes, I always input specific keywords like “ffmpeg hevc”, “student discount”, etc.
There might be a possibility that some people don’t want to filter by tags unless you explicitly specify with tag:.
So, perhaps, the issue would depend on how you manage notes.

By the way, you can add a filter by a tag by clicking a tag on the sidebar while holding Cmd / Ctrl.
Is it helpful for your workflow?

Can you please explain what your notes look like? I’d like to know why you exactly need that feature.
Perhaps there could be another way to solve it.
Thanks again for letting me know your thoughts as always!

3

Workflow

When I think about assigning tags I think about keywords (search terms).
These terms may or may not come up in the note body text, but they could be important for information retrieval at a later time (which is a big part of taking notes).
Synonyms & related terms and abbreviations are especially important to me, because when searching it can often times be difficult to remember the exact terminology you used.
Besides that each note gets labeled with broad categories.

Regarding your workflow:

Because when I search notes, I always input specific keywords like “ffmpeg hevc”, “student discount”, etc.

This raises the question: what if you can’t remember the exact search term? That’s why I emphasis synonyms & related terms (again: which might not come up in the note body).
And what if you’re not sure if you added a tag or just mentioned something in the note? When I just want to find something - why should I care? I went through the trouble of adding the tags, obviously I expect the program to use the added metadata to my advantage.
Now if I want to explicitly search for a tag I can still use the tag:... syntax.

I guess my point is less about having a specific search term and more about “random” retrieval or (re-) discovery. I take notes on a diverse set of topics and want to be able to find all relevant information across disciplines.

There might be a possibility that some people don’t want to filter by tags unless you explicitly specify with tag

My personal expectation is that tags are always related to the content and can therefore be expected to have relevance in a search.
At least the likelihood seams bigger to me opposed to what you’re suggesting. Of course I could be wrong.

And couldn’t you use the title:... and body:... filters if you really wanted to limit your search?

Example

I have a note containing information about bash.

What is the note about? bash
What are some broad categories? tool, development
What are some related terms? shell, cli

Functional workaround

I actually thought of a work around this morning: I can just write down my keyword list as YAML front matter / HTML comment at the top of the file.

---
tags: [bash,tool,development,shell,cli]
---

<!--
bash,tool,development,shell,cli
-->

But: since Inkdrop has explicit tag support (which I want to use because it’s awesome!), adding my keywords as Inkdrop tags + in the note body violates the DRY principle.

Let me know what you think.

4

That makes sense. I basically search specific notes with specific keywords.
I rarely randomly explore notes by searching for rediscovery.
I usually revisit notes by simply clicking tags and statuses on the sidebar, like reviewing the existing tasks. Because I don’t have so many tags. I prefer having minimal tags and notebooks. So, specifying a tag is always obvious for me.
For example, in my “Inkdrop” notebook, there are only tags like “Mobile”, “Android”, “iOS”, “Security”, “Bug”, “Important”, “Performance”, “Operations”, etc. They are basically used for categorizing notes.

On the other hand, it looks like your notes are more roughly organized than my use case. The tags are used for adding keywords rather than categorizing.
That’s due to the flexibility of tags that doesn’t restrict how you use them.

Now I understand why you want this.
Let’s try and see if it works.

5

For example, in my “Inkdrop” notebook, there are only tags like “Mobile”, “Android”, “iOS”, “Security”, “Bug”, “Important”, “Performance”, “Operations”, etc. They are basically used for categorizing notes.
On the other hand, it looks like your notes are more roughly organized than my use case. The tags are used for adding keywords rather than categorizing.

I forgot to mention, I use notebooks for broad (sometimes hierarchical) organization.
In use tags in addition - as you suggested - for adding keywords.

That’s due to the flexibility of tags that doesn’t restrict how you use them.

100%. The tag support in Inkdrop actually was one of the reasons why I chose it over possible competitors (and I’ve been a happy user ever since :tada:).

Let’s try and see if it works.

Awesome.

1 Like
6

Recently, I worked on updating the FTS module.
I reconsidered this feature request and found a good way to implement it.
Here is a demo:

memo
memo1010×2032 182 KB

As you can see, the notes with ‘Admin’ tags are listed with a query ‘admi’.
It’ll be available on the new mobile version first.
Since it involves internal breaking changes, it’ll be not available on the desktop version until updating its core modules.