Simultaneously viewing notes and their tags

I’m trying to implement the idea of using tags as a method for sub-grouping notes in a folder. For example - I have a folder with several notes for my course MATH123, and I want to see all the notes in there that are relevant to assignment 2. So I use the tag #A2 to quickly see which notes are for that assignment.

In Evernote you can see a list of your notes and the tags that are attached to those notes, so that works fine for this idea. However, I can’t really find an easy way to do it in Obsidian. I’ve tried:

  • The plugin “File Tree Alternative” supports filtering a note view by tag, but it doesn’t support tags in the YAML header.
  • Using search I can use “path:… tag:#A2”, but this isn’t easy.

An idea I had was that I could use Dataview to create a table that I can quickly modify to show me notes based on path and tag. I’m not certain if this is possible, but it sounded better than using search.

A second idea was if there was a way to right-click a folder and say “Search in folder”, but a search through community plugins didn’t bring back anything obvious to do this.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for what I’m trying to do?

Thank you!

Dataview is likely a good option.

Another thing you can do directly in Obsidian is embed a search query. I’m not a huge fan of how it formats the results, but it works without plugins. And it gives you a list of links you can follow to the results, embedded in your note.

You can use all the power of regular searches, including negative to exlude things.

This query shows me all the notes I have tagged “#WIP” that are in my Projects/Test Project Name folder:

```query
path:"Projects/Test Project Name" #WIP
```

If you don’t have spaces in your path, you don’t need the quotation marks. If you do have spaces, you do need to use quotation marks, otherwise it will search the partial path “Projects/Test” AND “Project” AND “Name”, and not show all the results.

FYI It’s better to search tag:WIP (or tag:#WIP) because that uses the index, which is faster and picks up tags in the YAML metadata field. #WIP just does a text search. (Sorry to nitpick a detail of an example!)

2 Likes

Great point!