Using # tags for different "types" of tag

Jerud

I haven’t made great use of #tags in the past. I’ve put them on, but it’s pretty rare that I actually filter a Pane for them, for example. One reason is that I can never decide what one “thing” I want tags to “mean”. Then I realized the problem was that I really had multiple “things” I needed them for so picking just one wasn’t helping.

I tried using +tags by settings “fake” contacts in my Google Contacts and really liked having two different tag colors. But I need to use Google Contacts for actual contacts now, so that option is gone.

So I started adding a symbol after the #. For example: #_, #@, #$. Some tags are for geographical location, some are for “type” of task, etc. This seems to work, though it’s a bit sloppy looking. I’m wondering what better ways y’all have come up with to handle this?

And I’m really wondering if anybody’s figured out a way to make tags be different colors depending on their “type”. Is that even possible to do in CSS?

Jeff

Jerud I haven’t used tags at all in Legend, but a useful approach I’ve seen in other apps is having key/value pairs for tags, like status:to_do, status:in_progress, etc. You could do this already in Legend, but Legend could also add features to work with them, like advanced search (“status is ‘waiting’ AND assigned_to contains ‘Jeff’”), giving them different colours, etc.

webalstrom

Jeff One of the first todo apps I used, TaskPaper (https://www.taskpaper.com/) had the ability to add values to tags. It was nice to be able to add an “@start:2021-12-01” tag and then be able to search everything that needed to be started that day (or week). Some of this functionality (like dates) is already built into Legend, but there are many other uses for adding values to tags. It could be a powerful addition to the filter feature and for organizing tags (especially when Legend switches over to the “one big document” model).

Jerud I’m sure there is a way to color tags based on their content. As I’ve said before, I migrated from Dynalist and that was available via the CSS editor for Pro members. I could also change the text of the tag, hide it completely or turn it into a symbol, all via CSS. For what it is worth, here is the link of CSS code snippets I compiled when I was using Dynalist (I haven’t given up my account yet… but I’m leaning towards it because Legend is so awesome!): https://dynalist.io/d/QSP8bOA8H2fdU3SrDg57gmdV (scroll down to the Tags section). Remember, the CSS on that page won’t translate directly to Legend, but by figuring out which elements control tags and what their names and states are, you could probably cobble things together. If anyone does this, please report back!

Jerud

webalstrom That info about CSS in dynalist is very encouraging…and overwhelming. I’m not a code guy; I can copy/paste snippets and make simple changes but coming up with novel functionality is well beyond what I’m ever likely to achieve.

What strikes me the most in what you’ve linked is: the Dynalist community is collaborating and developing solutions by directly sharing their Dynalist content. We need that.

LauraH Yeah I know many want a tag organizer, and that other thread about the new document structure in Legend definitely makes me think we’ll need more control over tags going forward.

Tag “prefixes” as you describe and as I’ve tried to emulate are a solution that doesn’t require a manager, but we do REALLY need a way to do bulk tag actions such as find/replace, delete-all, etc., and a tag manager could offer that. Such a tool might actually improve our ability to beta test and investigate bugs.

I painstakingly, manually, changed all my existing tags to use the version of prefixes that I had cooked up. Stupid me, I didn’t test them first; Legend doesn’t handle symbols well in filter criteria so my prefixes are all useless. Filtering a Pane on “#@” returns every #tag in the document, regardless of its first character. Now, this is a bug and I’m sure it’ll be fixed someday…but who knows how long it’ll be; I still have 4-year-old bugs in my queue. With a tag manager I could easily just pivot to a different prefix with find/replace and the impact would be low – I could keep moving forward with my use of Legend even if it weren’t “ideal”. Now I have to decide if this is worth burning more hours on manually re-changing my tags (only to eventually change them again in the future, when the filter is fixed). Maybe I export to text, run find/replace, then re-import…ugh.

LauraH

A Tag Organizer of some kind, especially a hierarchical one (as has been discussed and suggested elsewhere) might also enable some of this kind of functionality.

I also add prefixes to my tags much as you describe @Jerud and for much the same purpose. I find it especially helpful for searching - when i want to see only one category of information, search for just the prefix to get ALL those tags.

LauraH

If you don’t need to use the “tag” functionality of Moo (ie - you don’t need to sort by tag, etc. just need to be able to categorize information) - I find that notations like: “@.” or “%.” without the tag also offer criteria by which I can search and filter. Just not the full TAG functionality.

LauraH

Another kind of related “trick” I picked up awhile back:
I use a * symbol in the notes of an item to help indicate priority. This is NOT an exact science, more an intuitive feel. I’ll just insert ***** in the note, or ********** depending on how intuitively important the thing feels. Then search for ** to see all the starred items, and then keep adding ***** to your search until the list “feels” like the right level of importance for what you wanted to see.

Again - I’m NOT exact about this. I really don’t care if an item has 3 stars 5 stars or 6 stars or 15 stars. But it does offer a kind of “gut level” tool for filtering lists.

webalstrom

LauraH’s trick of using asterisks for designating priority is a good use case for values attached to tags. You could have a tag #p that designates priority. Then by using values, you could indicate how important it is, such as #p:1 or #p:13 (any anything in between or higher). Then by being able to search on the values, you could search for all #p tags with a value higher than 4 (or lower or equal to).

I know this is probably something that would take quite a bit of work to get into Legend (and there are other higher priorities, even for me) but it would be great to put somewhere on the someday/maybe list. I’d rate it as #p:6 😉

Jerud

Those are both good tips, I’m actually going to move this thread to “Showcase” just so those two remain visible.
I like the one with stars because I use “priority” to indicate “status” instead (wish I could rename them from high/med/low).

I do want the ability to sort the #tag blocks though, so I’ll be keeping those.

LauraH

webalstrom I could see others having use for these valued tags… but I want to be clear that I would NOT. The entire reason the astricks work for me is that I don’t have to decide on a number. I just add **** until it “FEELS” right. If I had to actually think, “Hrm, is this a 6 or a 7….” for me at least, it would break the system. 🙂

webalstrom

LauraH I think having the system that works for you (and all of us individually) is the best system and that is one of the great things about Legend: it is open ended so we can customize it how we want it (and also one of the frustrating things for newbies who are trying to learn how it all works!). If I could use the “the just feels right” system, I would probably get a lot more done. But my brain overthinks things and wants to figure out if it is a 6 or a 7… much to the detriment of my productivity!

Jerud Having values on tags could be something people use or don’t use. It wouldn’t be a requirement, at least I hope not! And it has potential behind setting priorities, that was just my example. It could be #client(NAME) and then you could search for specific clients. Or maybe #status(complete, inProgress, nextAction) (chose one value). Of course all of this could be achieved with separate tags or what I call compound tags (#status-inProgress), but having the value could make the tag organizer utility easier to manage. And maybe these valued tags could have a different symbol to designate it as a tag with a value (maybe a ! or a %). If you are interested to see how they work in TaskPaper, you can read the reference guide here (https://www.taskpaper.com/guide/reference/searches/ about half way down the page).

While I would love to see this functionality in Legend, it isn’t a deal breaker for me if it isn’t implemented. As I said to LauraH, it would just be another way to spend more time fiddling with the system instead of actually doing something. But I’m a systems person and this is what I like to think about (yep, I’m a nerd!). So I’ll stop going on about tag values and try to get some real work done! 😉

Jerud

Putting values on tags feels like mixing media. Tags are discrete labels – you’re talking about applying values along a continuum. That sounds more like a job for (expanded) priorities, which are already configured (albeit simply) that way. Rather than making #tags even more complex and dependent on esoteric symbols/syntax, instead allow users to customize the priority attribute (I suggest renaming this as well, to something more generic like “status” or even “color”).

If we could choose levels of priority from 0-10 instead of just 0-3, customize the colors and lables for each, users could create their own custom ranges to use for “priority”, “difficulty”, “urgency”, or anything else. You could even get 2 or 3 separate ranges out of that set of 10, differentiated by color and label (although your filters would get a little more complex).

Jeff

Jerud Putting values on tags feels like mixing media. Tags are discrete labels

Key/value pairs in tags are another thing that if you’ve never used it, you’d be surprised at how useful and powerful it is. I also used TaskPaper for a while, and there are various other apps that have the concept. It really expands the possibilities of what you can do. There’s nothing stopping people from doing it already, but extra support in the app for searching, sorting, etc. could enable a lot more. On the other hand, there would be nothing forcing you to use them, you can always use simple tags. I hope it’s something that comes to Legend someday.

Btw., I never set priorities on individual tasks. It’s too coarse, and there’s too much fiddling with it. My tasks are developed in planning outlines, and go into backlog lists sorted by priority, with the next action on top. Currently that’s by copying the tasks into Things 3, but hopefully it will soon be by mirroring them inside Legend. I think the concept of never assigning high/med/low priorities came from GTD. Along with the realization that there’s no need to spend time sorting my e-mail into folders or the trash (I have over 33,000 messages in my inbox), knowing that I never had to deal with a bunch of little stars again was quite liberating.

Jerud

webalstrom Jeff I guess I basically am using key/value pairs. By beginning every #tag with a symbol, the symbol is essentially the “key”. Too bad I didn’t realize the filter issue with them.

I’ve always hated setting static priorities. Does me no good to have all my tasks grouped as “high” “med” “low”. The implication is that you would only do “high” priority tasks until there were none left, then “med”, and so on. I dunno about y’all, but I have like 500 tasks in my queue…under that system, the med and low stuff might as well be deleted; it’ll never get done. Not to mention, how do you choose which of the dozens of “high” priority tasks to do next?

I use the vertical position of items in the Outline to convey relative priority: just do whatever’s on top next, regardless of zoom, filter, etc. Even if I really don’t feel like it… That’s why I’d love to see “priorities” renamed. Not only does the name push users towards an application – it’s not even a very good one. I prefer “status”, which works for both of the two different ways I use the feature…but even that is a pretty narrow term.

But anyway, it sounds like I’m already trying what y’all have suggested for the #tags. Hopefully some CSS nerd will join us here and figure out the custom-colors thing so I don’t have to learn it for myself! Great discussion on this topic, thanks all for sharing your ideas!