Tag workflow enhancements - Implied pages & auto-creation

[gjroelofs]

Please Select if your Request is Either something new or an Enhancement

• [ ] Enhancement of an existing Feature.
• [X] Request of a new feature.

Please select the area your request applys to. (Multiple selections are Possible)

• [X] UI
• [ ] Workbench
• [ ] Publishing
• [ ] Pods
• [ ] Markdown
• [ ] Hierarchy
• [ ] Graph
• [ ] Misc (Choose this if your not sure)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

At the moment, the preferred approach to implement Tags in a vault is to use a wiki-styled link prefixed with tags, e.g. [[tags.tagA]] per https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/8bc9b3f1-8508-4d3a-a2de-be9f12ef1821.html

This however requires us to create a page for this link if any of the features that a tag usually provides are requested:

• Display all known tags.
• See what pages are linked to what tags.

The normal flow of a tag in other programs tends to be that the act of defining the tag already provides the above functionality.

Creating a page requires us to go away from the current page introducing context-loss and adding overhead. In an ideal flow we would merely have to define a tag link for all functionality around it to work.

This introduces another issue in that if a user forgets to create the page, there is no overview showing all defined tags, requiring the user to go through all pages to see what tags exist and create pages for them.

Describe the solution you'd like

Functional solution

Display all known tags.

At the moment the Tree View already shows the parent pages of hierarchical wiki links if those parent pages do not exist. We could augment it to also show undefined pages for which links to exist.

See what pages are linked to what tags.

If the Tree view already shows linked-to (tags) pages which don't exist, the user can simply create the page and see the list. Alternatively, a separate pane could be made specifically for tags that shows all tags discovered in the project - with linked pages as leafs in the tree.

Technical solution Auto creation of pages for wiki-links that start with tags. is a solution.

[funnym0nk3y]

I'd go one step further and decouple tags completely from note files. Viewing all tagged pages via the backlinks view is quite awkward. It would really help my usecase of tags if in the seperate window you mentioned could be displayed and grouped according to their hierarchy in the actual notes tree.

[ghost]

Then Tags would need to be either defined in another way or schemas need a way to declare something as a tag.

[emarthinsen]

I'd like to add a +1 for reworking tags. I see the logic in implementing them as pages. Backlinks can be used to find the notes with those tags. The existing refactoring tools can be used to rename tags. That said, having to remember to create a page for each tag feels like an easy point of failure. I'd much rather tags are handled more like they are in other systems. I'd love to see a tag explorer that had the ability to find notes with a tag, rename a tag, etc.

One thing that I do like about the existing tag implementation is that it lends itself very well towards hierarchical tags, like status.incomplete. I wouldn't want to lose that.

[ghost]

Is there an Update on this?