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by jrm4
1378 days ago
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I cannot echo enough how absolutely deceptively terrible of an idea "tags" are. They seem right because your brain likes to categorize things, and one word categories, why not? I struggled with them for years because in the back of my head they felt like a necessity. And when I actively banished them from my note-taking flow, it was like the skies opened up. I realized that what I should be doing is simple "being verbose enough in the note taking such that searching later is robust against me trying to remember what I tagged things." As in, it's a minimal marginal amount of effort to write for "future you" as if that person were a stranger, not someone who remembered your tags. (fyi it's http://zim-wiki.org all day every day for what I do. I've tried most all the others and I keep coming back.) |
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They are terrible. Not a single useful catalog of information uses the concept of willy-nilly off-the-fly generated tags. Their degree of terrible-ness is exemplified on any wordpress website. Absolute junk.
Folders are awesome, otherwise. Not in this case. Because you need to "open" a folder to look in. Can't eyeball closed folders. Easy to overdo with too many folders within folders. Easy to underdo putting too many unrelated things into one. Easy to fo wrong with naming the folders. Naming folders and find the "right home" for a file becomes a chore. Moving from one folder to another needs both to be well defined not overlapping.
A list of files is much harder to get wrong. In one extreme case, you have 1 big text file. The other, you have a huge list of text files. Both are not a nightmare to fix (sed+awk+grep is all you need). Works well on all OSes including those from the 70s and the ones on all my phones. Copy and paste friendly. Super easy to backup. Also diffs well. Only issue i have is not being able to use images. Thats why I use email now. Just works. Every-fking-where.