Questions about Qbisidan and Logseq

Questions
21

I agree that tagging is useful and it’s more advanced feature, but it serves different purpose (than folders): connect (sometimes unrelated) knowledge in a non-hierarchical manner.

You can use tags to connect logically unrelated notes, e.g. by using “to-review” tag.
Or you can use nested tags for classifications: “year/2000”, “year/2001”.

Tags introduce more cognitive burden in your workflow, because of their dynamic(flexible) nature. A note is (usually) have a single folder, but can have multiple tags. It’s always easier to start with a folder, and add tags as needed.

Having a visual hierarchical(tree-like) structure (folders) is a standard way for representing digital information and it’s very intuitive. It became more obvious as you start accumulating hundreds of notes.

And, as @kissu noted, tags for “grouping” will work only for pretty simple knowledge bases. You can’t easily expand/collapse/reorder/copy/move/delete(with related notes) while maintaining your library, as you can do with folders.
And a folder will be easily accessible outside the app (e.g. for sharing).

Besides that, folder names often contains spaces, which is (usually) not applicable to tags.

One may say that there is a graph view available for visual representation, but I think it’s not suitable for daily usage, as it’s pretty clunky and doesn’t provide all the editing features of folders.

1 Like
22

I guess here we hit a paradigm barrier: you want folders - so you seek folders, nothing else.

same a tag-person would argue that folders are unusable, only because he’s so used to thinking with tags.

somewhat like nested folders can be archived with just filtering by 2 or more tags.

23

Obsidian also has (nested) folders + tags + bi-directional links with [[your-thing]] (and probably more that I am not aware of)
I rather go all the way than being stuck with one solution. :sweat_smile:

24

ah, so then only folders are missing in logseq

25

i think it’s only standard and intuitive because we grew up with hierarchical filesystems.
but there is too many cases when you cannot logically nest one folder under another as they are orthogonal.
and in my opinion, when notes are not in hundreds, but in thousands and more - tags are much handier to filter them and find exactly what’s needed.

Again - it’s all just a matter of habit, but in theory, tags alone are more expressive than hierarchical folder structure

26

No boilerplate goes over that quite well yes