Unlike the tags, the keywords need allowing having spaces. It’s a mechanism to use a natural phrase such as “Software Architecture” as a fixed unit for searching, indexing, or matching.
It could be not settle for replacing with the tags such as #SoftwareArchitecture or #software-architecture; at least for the following reasons
such the tags are unnatural and not suitable for general statements/text
the keywords (or index terms, etc.) as natural phrases are in fact widely used
I want to use a ‘tag’ that allows having spaces, such as #‘software architecture’ , and the software architecture will be listed in the tag pane, and the text/notes with the keyword can be indexed by an exact matching.
For example:
Abstract. …
Keywords: Software Architecture; Programming Language
There’s a workaround you can use. Create a folder and call it Keywords. Inside this create any note that you’d want to be a keyword like Software Architecture. Then whenever you open this file, open it’s backlinks and under Unlinked Mentions you’d find a list of all files mentioning the words naturally with a space and no special characters. If you like from here, you can even link them. Some of us actually use [[]] for tags since it works better than # for now just because of the backlinks feature.
Thank you for you great idea. It’s a useful tip and works very well.
Though I still think that it’s worth to developing a simple, generic approach like the current tags, which supports using natural phrases as keywords to link the notes/texts. I think that it’s a quite basic way for organization and management of knowledge.
I understand your need for having words in your notes which don’t stand out like #tags or [[links]] but are still connected. How does an app scan for meaningful keywords though? Wouldn’t every word/combination have a possibility of being a keyword? With either using explicit links or tags OR using unlinked mentions, we are narrowing down to specific words that the app can scan in a wall of text. And if we just have a way to create keywords in some interface which the app will know to scan for, then unlinked mentions already do that.
Yes, as you said, I imagine an ideal situation where a phrase can be marked as a keyword, and then there’re some convenient ways to show the mentions in the base (vault) and even navigating by them. Up to a point, [[link]] can do that but it’s mandatory to create a note, a .md file named with the keyword; and the #tag cannot tag a natural phrase with space.
It seems possible. such as attaching a mechanism to [[link]] to open a backlinks pane without creating a note file, or extending the #tag syntax to support the expression like #‘Natural Phrases’…