Use case or problem
When I have a very long document, I like to tag specific paragraphs or bullets to make it easier to find related ideas.
I’m a writer, so I use Markdown for outlining stories. For each scene in my outline, I use a tag to identify the characters that appear in the scene, e.g. #ian, #rick, #kate
At the moment, those tags apply at a document level. I can find the documents tagged with #ian or #rick or #kate. But once the document is open, there’s no elegant way to only view the scenes related to that tag.
Proposed solution
I switched to Obsidian from FoldingText as my primary Markdown editor. One of the things that allowed me to make that switch is that Obsidian supports folding/collapsing of headers, which was the primary reason I was still using FoldingText despite it being basically a dead product. The header folding functionality allows me to collapse/hide irrelevant parts of my document, so I can really focus on the parts that matter.
FoldingText had a similar solution for tags, and I really miss that. You could click any tag in a document, and it would collapse/hide any paragraphs or bullets where that tag didn’t appear. This effectively let me say “show me all the scenes in the story where Ian appears, and hide everything else.”
For example, a document might contain:
- This is a scene about Ian. #ian
- This is a scene about Kate. #kate
- This is a scene about Ian and Kate. #ian #kate
- This is a scene about Rick. #rick
- This is a scene about Ian and Rick. #ian #rick
With tag folding, I could click #ian, and the document would look like this:
- This is a scene about Ian. #ian
...
- This is a scene about Ian and Kate. #ian #kate
...
- This is a scene about Ian and Rick. #ian #rick
I can clearly see how Ian’s character arc plays out over the course of the story, without the distraction of irrelevant scenes. The dots in between visible lines let me know that there is content hidden between them. Clicking the dots would unhide the hidden content in that area. There also needs to be a global unhide shortcut so you don’t need to manually click all the dots to unhide.
The same sort of thing applies to something like lecture notes, where a long lecture might span a bunch of different topic areas. A lecture on writing might have bullets for #outlining, #editing, #character-arcs, #proofreading, etc. Tag folding would allow me to say, “Show me all the notes on #editing, and hide everything else.” This would allow me to better study that specific topic.
Current workaround (optional)
I can technically using CMD-F to find the tags in the document, but that still makes it hard to really focus on the related concepts. With tag folding, more related stuff fits on the screen at once, which therefore allows my brain to connect concepts just by seeing them next to each other.