Create Note Groups

[cleer]

While I understand that NV is striving for simplicity, I feel that it would be much more useful if notes could be sorted into groups. As a student, I would like to take class notes with NV and be able to keep my notes for each class separate for organization purposes. Perhaps the user could define just a few groups to appear as tabs at the top of the application. These tabs would then filter the search to only search within their groups. Effectively, groups would work like having a few separate NV databases.

[scrod]

You can do this right now using the bookmarks feature. Because bookmarks also include the search terms, you can simply add to all members of a group a unique word or phrase that identifies them. Search for that word, select one of the notes, and then bookmark it. Create one bookmark per group. Repeat for any additional group of notes that you'd like to keep exclusively visible. Now, to switch between your groups, you can simply press Command-1, Command-2, etc.

[cleer]

Ah, I overlooked the bookmarks feature. It works rather closely to what I was describing. Still, I can't help but feel like these features could be developed a bit more to make them more usable for this purpose without sacrificing simplicity.

While it makes sense for the standard note bookmark use, it seems a bit awkward to have to select a single note to make a bookmark for instead of a search term in this situation. It seems more logical to be able to bookmark any search term.

For the sake of not creating tons of threads, I'll throw in some ideas in here that are related to this use of NV but not completely related to this implementation idea itself. I understand that some of these ideas may be pretty exclusive to my personal use and perhaps overstepping the simplicity goal of NV, but I reckon I'll throw them out as they're good for ideas nevertheless.

For this specific use, I feel like the current in-progress tags feature could be developed to be quite useful when combined with the bookmarks feature. I suppose the limiting feature here for me is that the bookmarks feature relies on the search term in the search bar. It would be great if I could bookmark a tag and then have NV fixed on that bookmark such that whatever I created next was automatically tagged with the tag. Alternatively (or preferably in addition), as was described in another thread, tags would be more useful if they could be added via a backslash (/tag) as The Hit List currently handles them, especially if done with an autocomplete.

Again unrelated to these requests but related to this use pattern, it would be helpful if NV had a sort of templates feature. Then notes created while "fixed" under a tag bookmark could automatically be set up with these templates.

[scrod]

These are some excellent ideas! I don't think much of this would violate NV's simplicity, especially as these features are conceived as a composition of simpler ones.

[axelGschaider]

wow great. didn't know that the bookmarks also store the search.
just one sad thing: when the node I initially selected when creating the "group" is deleted, the group is deleted too. Not a big issue but a minor limit to the use-bookmarks-as-note-groups hack ;)

[yvonnethomson]

This doesn't directly relate to your groups feature, but a work around for the templates feature could be to use a text expansion utility such as textexpander or even, for simple ones, OSX's built in text substitutions.

I'm using this, for example, for a programmers log. Start a note or append to an existing note and type an abreviation. That inserts a date stamp and a time stamp for me in a format I want. I've got another one that just puts in a timestamp for when I'm keeping a running log with multiple entries in a day. This sort of thing could be easily used for other sorts of templates, I think.

[MacJack]

+1 bookmarkable tags - great feature

[Dilnu]

I'd also recommend considering http://github.com/scrod/nv/issues/6#issue/6/comment/356687
I'm using this method until tags are more fleshed out in the code.
I also support the bookmarkable tags idea but I think that most of what I need that to do could be handled by the ability to bookmark searches without a note selected and/or the ability to return to your search and add more terms after navigating into a note. You can do this now with the button at the left of the search bar but it would be nice if there was a keyboard shortcut as well.

[Dilnu]

I'd also like to see a not operator in search particularly with tags.

[scrod]

You can do this now with the button at the left of the search bar but it would be nice if there was a keyboard shortcut as well.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the shortcut to de-select the current note (restoring any previous search-text in the process), is Command-D. This is documented on the list of keyboard shortcuts and under the View menu.

[Dilnu]

Thanks, I missed that for some reason when I was looking.