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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, folders are really like limited tags where the only relationship you are allowed is "and then".

It would be nice to see a system that would present a tag set in the appearance of folders for all "and then" relationships but then let you mix in things like "and also", "or", and "but not".

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This is the nodal graph structure used in ibGib. Each datum is an immutable snapshot with internal an data map and named rel8ns to other ibGib. So each ibGib is a folder and a file. It is ends up technically being a merkle tree graph, because the `gib` is a sha 256 hash of the contents. "Tags" per se are only another named relation that ive just implemented in my feature branch yesterday: https://github.com/ibgib/ibgib/commit/776d053005bd5269892c57...

Here are some links:

ibGib github: https://github.com/ibgib/ibgib

Howdy (demo of sorts): https://www.ibgib.com/ibgib/Howdy%5E4E21C259CCCDE5003C2B2876...

Meta (contains links to many ibGib Ive created and use regularly) https://www.ibgib.com/ibgib/Meta%5E7A0C4871CB6F365B9D939148D...

Hi. My brother and I are working on a note taking system; one of the focuses being increased utility of tags.

Of note relating to tags:

- tags are hierarchically organized and inherit their parents. (Systems like gmail and evernote dont do this?! o_O)

- NOT and AND blocks

- Option for seeing full lineage of tag

- "Tag Clusters" which are basically a named group of tags that are commonly used and can be bulk applied to an item

On the way: Full AST (abstract syntax tree) tag/user/text querying (the UI isnt the easiest to nail down for OR / parenthetical groups)

Laddice.com (desktop app only right now)

Feel free to check it out, make an account and email me with thoughts, opinions and/or requests (email's in my profile.)

Would love to talk more about this with you!

Interesting. I'm working on an image tagging system that basically does the same. It grew out of the fact that I'm the family historian and I have 40k family pictures spanning 8 households that go back to 1840. Gets hard to find that one picture you vaguely remember seeing once.

+1 for hierarchical tags. I've been organizing all my bookmarks (about 12K going back more than a decade) with Usenet-style tags like comp.lang.python and sci.bio.paleontology for several years now. It works great, especially since Pinboard lets me autocomplete by tag prefix.

One of the things that I think most services like Gmail missed when they tried to replace folders with tags is that although the same item can belong to multiple categories, the categories themselves usually don't have a completely flat relationship to one another. An article can relate to both Python and paleontology, but that doesn't change the fact that Python is a programming language and paleontology is a subfield of the biological sciences. This will be very useful later when I'm trying to remember something that uses some programming language to analyze data in some subfield of the biological sciences, for example.

Tags look cute on a screenshot when you have a few hundred items. But when you have tens of thousands of items, you need a bit of hierarchy to protect your sanity.

But Gmail tags do have hierarchy...

Nested labels were only introduced in 2010 or 2011. Can't remember exactly when, but they certainly weren't available when I first started and then stopped using Gmail. Something as basic as how to organize your email should not have been an afterthought.

It was probably a concession, not an afterthought. Google's whole thing with Gmail was "keep all your email, don't bother organizing, search will solve all."

My point was that in gmail, tags dont inherit their parent when searching

Example:

  - Action
    - Task
       - Closed
       - Open

When searching action, its my preference to see all items tagged with either Action, Task, Open or Closed, but gmail only filters for Action

tmsu (https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/) is working on that. It's a project to give tags on all the files you care about and then lets you query them either manually on the command line, or through a virtual file system where each "subdirectory" is actually a "and this tag as well". For more complicated queries such as the one you want, it is possible to directly cd into a complicated query; see https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/Virtual-Filesystem#queri... for instance.

I have been begging for this for years! Make it!

See my sibling post :-)

I think we're looking for the same thing.

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