so in Roam, I fell into a habit of using / to disambiguate terms. in reality, I probably could’ve used a - or even just a space. but now I have 118 folders in my vault. an example is, I have a vertigo.md and a “Movie/Vertigo.md”, to distinguish between the medical term and the movie.
so my question is, what should I do now? I can write scripts to move them (and update references too), but the question is, what should my target be? I don’t need folders to organize the info, I’m happy to let the page names and relationships do that for me.
You say no folders, but he has a lightweight structure that might help you keep vertigo and Vertigo separate in a non-hacky, sensible, non-fragile way.
a-mv-vertigo >>> meaning arts|movies|vertigo hc-ent-vertigo >>> meaning health conditions|ears nose throat|vertigo
When I initially set up my flat hierarchy system and was unsure where to put them I would check Wikipedia’s categories or do a search in Curlie
Actually I both prepend & pospend my tags with “-” so as to make them more visible in a Graph as well as easily searchable in regex queries … -a-mv-vertigo- -hc-ent-vertigo-
I guess my trouble with tags and folders are they get out of hand and I start forgetting which ones to use once I get too many. I do like his idea of using folders to make it easier to filter searches. I might be able to use that for about 3 or 4 things. not sure.
I did actually try to create a new item in an existing folder in obsidian but it didn’t work the way I wanted to. I just wanted to create, let’s call it [[a/b]]. so I just created that link in obsidian then clicked on it to create the page. but now when I search for it it shows a/b in the search rather than b in the folder a
“get out of hand and I start forgetting”
… that is precisely why my system works for me.
If I’m unsure what tag to use then typing the “top/left most” part of my tag … … #a- >>> arts #ch- >>> computing hardware #cs- >>> computing software
… #hc- >>> health conditions #hn- >>> health nutrition
… #sp- >>> sports
…
… into the search box will bring up the subset in the dropdown.
No big thinking involved, but different strokes for different folks
I took the title out of the frontmatter of Movie/Vertigo, but it didn’t matter. so what is the difference between Movie/Vertigo.md and A/B.md so they are displayed differently? they look the same in the CMD-O search
ok, I figured it out. Movie/Vertigo always shows as Movie/Vertigo because there is also a vertigo.md in the top folder, so obsidian is showing the folder name too to resolve the ambiguity (and in a case-insensitive manner, too).
the A/B.md I created, well there was no B.md in the top level, so there was no ambiguity. as soon as I created B.md at the top level, my existing mentions of [[B]] instantly changed to [[A/B]].
