(Bear app) Help me learn to love tags *please*!

For what it’s worth, you’ve hit on exactly why I have never stuck with Bear. It’s an excellent writing environment, but like you my head thinks in terms of folders rather than tags.

I am, however, learning to love the DevonThink implementation of tags. I think of them as an extension of folders, rather than a replacement for them or something different.

However, last time I gave Bear a serious try, it sorted tags in alphabetical order, or by number of documents containing the tag, and those are the only two options. I prefer to sort my tags/folders by most-recently-modified. So that was it for me and Bear; I could not adapt to their way of sorting tags.

And now I find Craft and Obsidian to be superior to Bear in every way.

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Oh, I’m totally belt-and-suspenders: tags AND folders, thank you very much. I think in folders and search in tags.

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Explain, please? Examples?

To tell the truth, I have not embraced tags as much as I claim to have done in my previous message. I can use a tagging system, but I tend to attach one tag per item. In other words, I use tags like folders.

I search using … search. I remember an unusual word or phrase in a document and use that to search on. Also, I sort documents into folders by project; when I’m looking for the documents related to a particular project, I look in the appropriate folder.

I tried writing shorter documents in Obsidian, but it didn’t quite click for me. The thing I like about Notebooks is that I can toss a couple of PDFs or some other reference material into the same folder as the document I’m working on for a quick look or cut-and-paste as need be. The reference material lives in a sidebar that I can easily see and click on while I’m working.

Also, I’m trying to reserve Obsidian for linked notes and linked notes only.

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Simple example: I keep the books and records for a small performing arts non-profit I work with. DevonThink is—of course!—the repository where I store all of the related documents. I’ve got a folder (a “group” in DT terms) where I store our IRS 990’s, a folder where I store our annual state filings, a folder where I store grant agreements, a folder where I store venue rental agreements, a folder where I store certificates of insurance, a folder for bank statements, etc., etc., etc. I also create a folder for each fiscal year where I store things like scans of donor checks, invoices, receipts, records of electronic disbursements and receipts, and the like.

I add a tag to each document indicating what fiscal year it’s from (our fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, so searching by calendar year won’t work), and other information as relevant, e.g., payment method used (either for receipts or payments), the specific event it’s associated with, the fundraising campaign, etc.

If I want to see all of the donations from Daddy Warbucks, that’s easily done via a name search. But let’s say I want to confirm which of our donors made their contributions via paper check over the last five years. I can ask DT to pull up the documents tagged “donation” and “check” and it will return all of the scanned checks that were for donations. (Yes, there is a spreadsheet with all of this information in it but, trust me, it’s mission critical to be able to cross-check a spreadsheet entry against a document.)

Or, let’s say I want to see the documentation for all of the payments and receipts connected with a specific event: I just search for everything tagged with the event name. Those payments and receipts may be spread over more than one fiscal year and may be linked to a couple of different rental agreements—and will thus be in different folders. Searching by the event tag pulls them all into one window.

For work like this I generally find it easier to file documents by type—except for transaction records, which get filed by fiscal year—and tag them by what I’ll roughly call purpose. So, all the insurance certificates are in one folder, because that’s the type of document they are, but they’re tagged to reflect which event they were for, which is their purpose, generally speaking.

The tag and folder systems for my knowledge work repositories are different because they’re not transaction based, but the principle is not dissimilar.

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Notebooks seems pretty neat. My notes are currently in Joplin, which is does most of what I need except for 2 things

  1. Sync via iCloud
  2. Searchable by Spotlight.

I did a quick check in help and in the pull down menus, and didn’t see any ways to import notes. Seeing as I have tens of thousands of notes that I would need to import, have you found any import tools for Notebooks?

Update: I was able to export from Joplin to markdown, putting the files into the Notebooks folder. That lost metadata such as location data , tags, and the original date created on the files. The app also lacks a Web clipper plugin that Joplin has. It does sync over iCloud and is indexed by Spotlight, which is good.

Too bad I cannot find an app that has all of the features ( including markdown and inline attachment viewing ) .

Bear is almost there but it doesn’t support notebooks. Joplin remains the closest match for the features that I want.

The search continues.