Progressive Filtering in Tag Pane when choosing a tag

I’ll be short.

Desired behavior:

Tags list gets filtered when choosing (clicking on) tags, so only tags that occur in documents together with selected tag(s) are shown in the list. Every click* (another selected tag) narrows list down, deselecting previously selected tag widens list back.

This is fantastic way of working with tags, I’m telling you all!

* ctrl-click - all of this functionality already exits in Tag Pane (20221226)

34 Likes

great idea that will help us alot

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Great idea!

It might also be helpful to have a different modifier key to hold down that would add the subsequent tags clicked in the search separated by an OR operator.

If it did this, it would be helpful to have on option (not default) to have the tag list filtered to only show tags that would add to the selection of notes. Of course, when building embedded or saved search queries, you may have notes that have yet to be created that could have a tag you would know you wanted in that query if you had seen them. This also applies to your suggestion, so maybe having a toggle for this all around would be best.

Thanks.

2 Likes

Hi everyone,

I posted this as a suggested plugin but figured it might be an appropriate feature for the main app. It would be game changing to have a more Roam/Notion-like search and filtering system in Obsidian when dealing with tags. I know we can search for any tags in the normal search box, but this requires us to know exactly what we’re searching for ahead of time. With notion, when you search for a tag, it brings up a box that lists all the other tags that are also tagged alongside your original search. As you keep clicking more tags, the list gets smaller, so you can dig deeper into your notes quickly and seamlessly. I think this is a really generative way to manage and work efficiently with your notes and ideas. This is the only advantage I see Roam and notion having over Obsidian, but maybe we can replicate it with a plugin.

We already have a tags pane in Obsidian, so it would just require some new functionality there.

Cheers!

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I agree, this is the way like it works in Zotero and makes very easy to choose the right tags for a deeper research.

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Happy to see this thread gaining some popularity. :slight_smile:

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I like how the work with tags is implemented in evernote

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This should not only work for clicking on tags, but for performing any queries on the search pane. Being able to search for a tag or even a random string, and only seeing which tags apply to the notes with that particular string or tag (with number of occurrences) would be a killer feature.

3 Likes

Just thought I’d link this video by Bryan Jenks which shows how the new tags system works in Zotero for iOS Beta. https://youtu.be/yjN-sdvhH3A This is exactly how it should work within the tags pane on Obsidian! It would be a game changer!

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Yes, tags should work like this. I can not imagine how this is not a standard… so much software not implementing tagging this way.
Tags are kind of useless without this, very simple, functionality.

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Great Idea, sounds also simular to evernote tag filtering, which I like alot

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looks like evernote, +1 for this

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Originally I thought about the first step - making filtering work in main app. This alone needs to be tought through thoroughly. I think this is a good start, but this should trickle down to Obsidian Publish - making tags first class citizens on the platform with a graph view (great functionality which can make Obsidian Publish stand out). I just checked and as far as I see, tags are not implemented at all in Publish at the moment or are they?

Also, there is a mobile version now, which multiplies work required. Trying to look from devs perspective makes thinks a bit trickier, I guess.

Still… :slight_smile:

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Hello… it’s me again… on the very same topic.

From my point of view (I know thing or two about how computers/code work, but am not a programmer) almost everything is up and ready to simply introduce the functionality (see first post in the thread):

Clicking on tags in Tag Pane already works:

  • Click sends clicked tag to Search Pane
  • Ctrl-Click adds or subtracts clicked tag to/from Search Pane

The only thing missing is filtering view in Tag Pane, so only tags co-existing in all notes are shown in the Tag Pane.

I think load on the performance is negligible.
Is it really so hard to add this functionality?
Could someone pick this idea and create simplest proof of concept plugin?
Could it be implemented easily in the core?

with love :slight_smile:
pbr

1 Like

+1
You won’t believe that I was going to publish this idea of yours, but I see that it has already been published and has been well received.

Select a tag, and based on the notes result list, extract the rest of the tags within them and display them as an option in the tags panel to further narrow the search.

This is how most good tag organization software works.

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You won’t believe how puzzled I am every time I gently try to get attention to this on Discord (which I do from time to time - I’m gala8y on Discord). It’s like standing on the edge of the blackest void. No response (with two exceptions). At this stage I start to feel like I’m doing something wrong, or missing something. xd

Nicely put.

Without this, tags become useless pretty fast. With this, all is possible.
And I’ve noticed that this idea is actually rarely implemented, AFAIK.
Del.icio.us, ZimWiki, Evernote, Bibsonomy, Pinboard. (Edit: + apparently Roam and Notion as Dpthomas87 mentioned before.) Not too many examples I know of.

Also, I would be happy to help in any way possible I can to help incorporate the idea, eg. thinking/discussing about implementation, including donating to The Cause. :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Hi,
I have been trying to come up with a solution to the search functionality in tag pane, the closest I could come up with so far is python script that does can search between tags then open them in search pane inside obsidian,
I would love some inuputs if it would help anyone.
cheers
link to the repo>

2 Likes

Maybe also include at the top an indicator that the list is filtered, so if you leave the search field filled after using it you don’t mistake the filtered set for the complete list.

Also a toggle to switch between AND and OR.

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Hey guys. Surely at this stage in the game we need to be able to filter by tags. It’s great to have so many niche features in Obsidian but tag filters seems like an obvious core feature that’s just missing. Thanks to Eleanor for including this in the weekly round-up. Here’s hoping it gets a bit more attention. It might not matter to every Obsidian user but to many it’d enhance workflows tenfold.

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is there any development on this?