Keep It: Organizing and future-proofing

Playing around with Keep It. Couple of questions:

  • Folders AND tags AND bundles? Huh? I get folders vs. tags, but what’s the diff between bundles and tags?

  • Future-proofing: I’m concerned about that. What is the file format for the default .kptinfo notes? What’s the difference between those and RTF documents?

I’m also looking at Notebooks, btw.

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Bundles are like Smart Folders: they can be used to collect items into virtual piles where, unlike folders, items can be in more than one bundle at a time, and I’m pretty sure deleting a bundle does not delete the item.

Edit: Yup.

As far as export goes check that link as well: zip file for download, and notes are exported as RTFD.

Sure, but what’s the difference between that and tags?

I’m reminded of when I was digging deep into Wordpress and trying to figure out what the difference is between tags and categories. I concluded there essentially is none – some people like categories, some people like tags, and that’s that.

One possible difference between “same but different” grouping features is how they’re used downstream, though. E.g., in WordPress, different plugins might work on categories but not on tags, etc.

An insignificant difference but potentially useful.

I don’t know about Keep It, but DEVONthink also has tags and Smart Groups. The latter are populated with a rule set (e.g., “.md files modified yesterday”).

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Which are different use cases, unlike, as far as I can see, bundles and tags.

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Basically, like folders and saved searches, bundles are lists, but tags are not. The practical implications that I can think of are:

  • Bundles have identifiers and URLs. Tags do not have identifiers and URLs.
  • Bundles can be placed within folders. Tags cannot be placed within folders.
  • Tags can be used to filter within a list. Bundles cannot.

Unlike folders, which can contain items, bundles, saved searches, and other folders, bundles can contain only items.

My current usage of tags and bundles might be illustrative.

I collect items across folders into bundles for particular projects. Then, to connect a bundle for a project in Keep It to the project in a task manager, I can put a link to the bundle in the note or URL field in the task manager.

I use tags to identify areas of focus (e.g., #house), document types (e.g., .receipt), etc., that I often find myself wanting to filter lists of items by.

Keep It’s really flexible. I like Notebooks, too, but it doesn’t have a good means of having the same item appear in multiple places.

I hope this is helpful.

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Very helpful, thank you. I do like to have items appear on multiple places sometimes.

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I emailed the developer and got a response back within 12 hours. It’s pretty much what @mpmanti said.

Also, the proprietary .kptinfo documents are for proprietary features – something called “Smart checklists,” I think. And default file types for new files can be reset; Keep It supports native RTF, Markdown and Plain text, and can read a variety of other common file types.

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