tomalmy wrote
I’d like to think that the older you get the more likely you are to go for plain text.
So THAT explains it 
Yeah, I got burned by Apple changing the format of Pages files and the new version couldn’t open the old files. Come on Apple, Pages isn’t that old and your already abandoning files just a few years old?
I have to say I had given up, but Obsidian is remarkable and I am trying again to tend my garden on .md files.
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Above I described how my own personal hypertext note system is simply a set of interlinked HTML files created with TextEdit and tagged with standard macOS tags. I’ve been using this system for years; it’s simple, easy, robust, and works out of the box with any standard install of macOS since 10.9 Mavericks.
Recently I encountered a comment on Hacker News, written just a few months ago by someone who apparently does not use macOS, that illustrates so well why Mac users are fortunate to have tags at the operating-system level. The commenter wrote:
It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS’s. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs.
The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I’d rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels.
I may want to label a file as ‘software’, ‘tech-architecture’ and ‘finance’ – all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn’t need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author.
To fix the problem of ‘no label’ as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff.
I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg ‘mytext.txt.meta’) – labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note ‘mytext.txt’ itself.
So, I think OS’s enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way
I pity this poor soul who has not discovered macOS and can only dream of “label support at the OS level”. But this comment from someone who is living in some alternate personal-computing universe without tags shows how those of us using macOS tags are living in a world where a big problem has already been solved. It’s a problem that we don’t need to “seek to fix with apps”.
The yearning has been satisfied; the battle has been won; the dream of tags at the OS level has been realized. We don’t need a proprietary app (or a sequence of them, one after another) to achieve a tagged and interlinked personal hypertext note system.
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