I’m pondering different things to do with Notae 3 (yes, it’s still happening).

The data store is moving to a single store per user rather than the documents aspect it has now (though it will import old documents into the new store, and you will be able to switch stores and keep it wherever you like (within reason)). Because of this, the ability to keep things in different notebooks will go away, which I’m not sure I like.

So an idea to keep it was to have distinct objects called Notebooks that notes could be associated with, like folders. Initial work with these didn’t work out so well because there was either the need to have an “All Notes” item in the source area (new) or force the use of a notebook, which seems a bit oppressive.

Another idea I’ve thought of was to use a special tag of the style “notebook:Notebook Name” that would represent the notebooks and then the sidebar would replace the tags browser in that you get a list of tags (including notebooks) and then once you click on one, the other tags are hidden to only show tags that intersect the current tag (like the browser does).

I kind of like this idea, but I’m unsure then what the functional difference between a notebook tag and a regular tag would be in the UI? I could do icons or other things but that would just seem to be confusing. I might just use the notebook syntax for imports only and then let users use tags as they wish after that, unless there’s some pressing need to have real, distinct notebooks.

Either way, whatever the current tag selection/filter is on the source list, when new notes are created I’m of the opinion that they should then inherit the currently-selected tags automatically so that you get a workspace, so to speak. I can pick the tags Work, Notae, and v3 and then any new notes will be in that context. When I pick some other context, those notes get hidden, and so on. It’d be great. :)

If any users have feedback, I’d love to hear it.