Less visually prominent tags (lighter, smaller, grey, compressed)

yakinbozek

In the current standard view, tags are automatically set to be rendered as bold, underlined, and also have the “#” hashtag behind them. Which I find quite cluttering and redundant.

And more importantly, on a conceptual level, it makes the tag more prominent in the visual hierarchy of the elements than the content that the tag is tagging.

I think this is a contradiction and should be the other way round. The written content of the node should have visually much more hierarchy than their tags. When we are reading our content, tags are just a secondary element that is super useful for searching and filtering, and organization, but we shouldn’t be seeing them as even more important than the main written content itself.

Maybe by tweaking the CSS one might be able to set them the exact way one wants. But I believe 99% of the users don’t like messing with CSS, neither do I. I love it when the apps standard mode is super well designed, well-thought, and pixel-perfect beautiful just right out of the box.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I believe Legend has all those qualities (well designed, well-thought, and pixel-perfect beautiful), I am just giving constructive feedback on this particular issue which I think could be improved so the perceived visual hierarchy of the element matches it conceptual importance as well.

In that regard, my suggestion is that the tags should be rendered as much less important than the text they are tagging, that could be achieved by design by making them smaller, setting them in a compressed version of the font so they are also shorter and take less space, or set in a lighter weight, or in a lighter shade of grey, or any of those alternatives combined.

Some time ago I was just adding all the tags in the notes space (after hitting shift+space) because they are so much subtle that, being smaller, grey, and lighter, they weren’t as cluttered as adding them at the end of the line. But then I realized they lose all the tag special property when filtering, searching, and organizing if they are inside the notes block.

Sorry for the extension of the request!
Thanks, and regards!

andrew

yakinbozek While in some use cases, this makes perfect sense, I use tags inline to notate certain parts of an item’s text, and if the tags were less prominent than the text, this wouldn’t be as effective. That said, setting the style would be a reasonable solution. While I’m fine with CSS, hopefully eventually there is an interface that doesn’t require CSS to edit styles.

yakinbozek

Jay That could be a good solution to also let use cases like the one andrew described.

I agree that muting dates to become subtler would be awesome as well. Regarding the last question, thinking of other examples of non-essential content elements that could be muted, the ones that first come to my mind are prefixes icon (project, bullet, number), the horizontal hierarchy line, dates, and obviously tags, which currently are really too prominent in my opinion.

I realize prefixes already have a very useful toggle option in the display settings, and tags have a checkbox for being grey, otherwise, on top of being bold, underlined, and hashtagged, they would be blue! 🤪

Since the first days of Moo.do I always had the display options set as:

prefixes: muted
greyscale tags: checked
automatically bold parent nodes: unchecked

Which I believe is the most minimal and cleanest view that Legend allows having right now. Yes, I think having a few more of this set of “quick tweaks” would be useful for all the people who don’t want or don’t know how to deal with code (css).

Regarding tags, on top of taking out the bold, outline, hash, and blue, I suggested a smaller and condensed font because that would allow having more tags at the end of the line without making the line too long. When a few tags accumulate at the end of a sentence, they usually break the sentence into two lines which often is annoying when aiming to have a consistent list of one-line-per-bullet format. Of course, this is just an idea and should be checked regarding legibility as well.

Jay

There’s been a few requests for small theme changes like this which have benefits on both sides, like to reduce intensity of dates for example.

I wonder if it would be useful to have a set of “Quick tweaks” which could toggle between two default theme options for specific features (which could be overwritten by the advanced theming). So there could be “muted tags” and “muted dates” toggles, and maybe more?

Are there more examples like this anyone can think of that would be useful?

Jay

yakinbozek Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what your setup looks like? You can send it as a private message if you prefer.