[tomboy-list] Tagging in Tomboy; why?

[Dylan McCall]

Building on the idea of notes tagging themselves...

I am finding it tedious to have to keep tagging notes that are really
directly related to another note.
So, what I'm thinking may fix that is if notes can inherit tags when they
are created using Create Note on selected text within another tagged note.
This could take a lot of fiddling to get right (not confusing), but could be
quite cool.

An example of the use there is I may have a School tag and a Literature tag,
and be working on the Pale Fire note, then I'd create a note from there
linking to John Shade. Previously I would have to do something such as tag
it School and Literature myself, but 'now' I would have those tags
automatically applied.

At first glance, this would mean notes sometimes getting mis-tagged, right?
Perhaps. It may change things for those who use tags, at any rate. However,
with the current system we get a problem as well: Lots of notes without
tags. For example, let's look at D. Moonfire's example with Exalted. A good
way to keep those organized is to have them all tagged Exalted. (Sort of a
makeshift Notebook created with tags. Tags can mimic every management
feature in existence, implemented well). However, there's a problem: Who
wants to click and tag 1200 notes Exalted? No one, that's who! That, then,
is why Tomboy does it automatically :)

Thus, if you want a whole bunch of notes sharing similar tags, make sure you
have one trunk note to link to them and they are instantly recognized as
being derived from that trunk.
This may get ugly, of course, if you randomly decide in the middle of
writing about Pale Fire "Hm, I like that word 'angry'. I'm going to make a
note with all the things that make me angry!", thus creating a link from
Pale Fire even though the new note has nothing to do with it. (Hm...
actually, it does, but that's besides the point).

Random thought: The Tomboy main window could list notes with expanding
boxes, thus jumping to notes linked within those... but that could be a
slow, horrible, clunky, ugly and bad idea. (Or maybe good. Just covering all
the bases). I'm thinking of F-Spot's cool hierarchical tags there...

Just food for thought. I hope it's useful!

Bye,
-Dylan McCall
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