[tomboy-list] A plea for "real" tagging

[Robin Munn]

I've wanted tags in Tomboy for a long time, and I remember being
excited back in 2007 when I saw that people were working on
implementing them. Great, I thought, by late 2007 or early 2008 I'll
finally be able to get an updated Tomboy with tagging. But 2008 came
and went, and no tags. There was a new "Notebooks" feature, but a note
could only go in one notebook at a time, so this was basically a
glorified folder structure rather than "real" tagging. "I guess tags
are still being worked on," I thought.

Come mid-2009, and I finally get frustrated enough to search the
Tomboy history and find out what's holding up implementation of the
tagging feature. Lo and behold, I discover the following in the 0.9.3
release notes:

   * Removed tagging UI (superceded by Notebooks).

Notebooks, as they are currently implemented in Tomboy (notes can only
belong to a single notebook at a time) are essentially folders. The
question of tags vs. folders is one that has been pondered many times,
and there's not much new I can add to the discussion. A few links to
discussions of the pros and cons of tags and folders:

http://www.osomac.com/2009/07/05/tags-vs-folders/
http://www.organizepictures.com/2007/11/tags-vs-folders-the-big-debate
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/organizing-chaos-folders-labels-search.html

When I searched for the reason why notebooks were made into folders
rather than tags, I could not find any evidence that this decision had
been deeply considered, or that the pros and cons above were pondered.
This does not mean that thought wasn't given to the issue, of course,
only that my Google-fu was unequal to the task of finding such
discussions if they exist. The only relevant discussions I found were:
1) the IRC log at the bottom of
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Notebooks, where it seems like the
rationale for "notebooks shall be folders rather than tags" was only
"notes in two notebooks at once is confusing" (apparently to both
users and developers), along with the fact that both participants in
the discussion had the same idea, to make notebooks into folders
rather than tags, at the same time. And 2)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380634, which was closed as
WONTFIX, but doesn't state the rationale for restricting notes to a
single notebook. Its closing comment merely states "We opted to
provide Notebook support instead [of tags]."

What's especially frustrating to me is that the current implementation
is so *close* to what I want. When I click the Notebook button on a
note and see the list of notebooks with radio buttons next to them, I
think "Why, oh why, couldn't those be checkboxes instead?" If there's
a concern about confusing users (which is a *very* valid concern,
don't get me wrong -- I know some very bright people who are
near-computer-illiterate, and I appreciate GNOME's focus on keeping
things simple enough for those people to be able to use them) then an
option could be added. "Allow notes to exist in more than one
notebook" could be a good wording for the option.

Fortunately, Tomboy searching is implemented in such a way that I can
write "Tags: foo bar baz" at the start of a note and have it show up
in a search. However, there's no way for me to say "Given all notes
tagged with foo, what other tags do they have?" Look at how the
del.icio.us Firefox plugin is implemented for an example of what I
mean: click on the "foo" tag, and you get a submenu of all tags that
share at least one bookmark with "foo". That makes it really easy to
track down that one bookmark that you don't remember what it was
called, but it was about a security hole in, what program was it, it's
on the tip of your tongue -- just expand your "security" tag and the
sublist of tags that "intersect" with the security tag will probably
jog your memory.

Let me give one more example of why Tomboy searching, plus a "Tags:
foo bar baz" text line inside notes, isn't quite enough. Let's say I
keep Tomboy notes about people I want to visit, places I want to see,
etc., in different cities. So I have tags for "Chicago", "Dallas",
"New York", and so on. I also have tags for "friends", "customers",
"family", and another set of tags for "restaurants", "hiking",
"museums", "parks", you get the idea. That's a lot of tags. Six months
later, when I'm planning a trip to Chicago and want to figure out
where to eat the evening I arrive, am I going to remember which tags I
used? Did I use the tag "restaurant" or "fastfood" here? (Or was it
"fast-food"? The question of spelling and singular vs. plural is also
a problem for a text-line-and-search implementation of tags.)
Saturday's supposed to be a clear day and I want to do something
outside. So I search for "Chicago hiking" and "Chicago parks", but I
forget to search for "Chicago discgolf" or "Chicago disc-golf". Oops,
I missed some tags that would be relevant to my search, and I won't
even think about calling up my friend Joel who really enjoys disc
golfing. But with a "Here are some tags that intersect with the one
you've chosen" list, I would see the "disc-golf" tag and be reminded
about it.

So, I have two questions:

1) Is there any possibility of re-visiting the decision to implement
folders instead of tags? Or at least pondering the rationale for
having one vs. the other? If this discussion has already taken place,
then a link to the mailing-list archives would at least satisfy me
that serious thought has gone into this issue, rather than a major
decision being taken merely on the basis of "we both had the same idea
at the same time". But if there hasn't been serious thought given to
the advantages of tagging over folders (e.g., the multiple, orthogonal
categories like place and activity that a note could belong to, like
"Chicago disc-golf" in my example above), then I think that discussion
needs to happen.

2) If, even after discussion of the pros and cons, the decision is
made to keep notebooks as-is (as folders rather than as tags), would
there be any significant technical challenge in writing an add-on that
turned notebooks into a "real" tagging system? And if such an add-on
were written, would there be any objection to including it in the
default set of Tomboy add-ons, initially disabled but there for
advanced users to turn on as they wish?

--
Robin Munn
rmunn at pobox.com
GPG key 0x4543D577