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

[eleusinian at gmail.com]

I agree that tags would be great, but in the interim, may I suggest a hack?

I wanted the ability to tag notes as "TODO".  So what I did was to create a
note called "TODO" and put that text in each note I wanted to tag. Turn on
the Backlinks plugin, and your TODO note suddenly lets you see everything
marked TODO.

It's not perfect, of course -- specifically, you can't do set up unions of
tags, etc. But it might help.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Robin Munn <rmunn at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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   * Removed tagging UI (superceded by Notebooks).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
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