#1

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

How do you feel? Thanks.

Zettelkasten Features - Note Sequencer and Keyword Index
#2

What is your use case for this feature?
What problem you’d like to solve?

1 Like
#3

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

(the keywords may need to be marked in some way…)

but not

Keywords: #Software-architecture; #Programming-Language

or

Keywords: #Software #Architecture #Programming #Language

#4

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.

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#5

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.

#6

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.

#7

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’…

#8

He’s explained his method at length several times, you should be able to find it.

#9

The method of using links without creating notes does work but then you can’t see any back links which is a requirement here.

I think the quickest solution might be to just allow spaces in tags like #key word#.

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#10

Which markdown editors support that syntax?

#11

It looks well, and in my opinion,

  • #'key word' and #"key word" are seemingly more consistent and compatible with existing syntax
  • Other, #[[key word]], #(key word) might also be considered
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#12

Bear does. There might be others that I don’t know.