I imported about 600 cards that have tags in a #tag format. There’s no way I’m manually adding tags to all of those which basically makes the entire tagging system useless to me since it fragments my notes. I’d love if we could support #tags in the note body itself
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My current workaround is to continue tagging with the text itself and just use a filter to search for “#tag”. But I’d love to be able to click the #tag in the body of the note to filter, etc.
Don’t tell anyone, but multi-edit is coming as a feature preview in 2.4 (very soon), so that should hopefully fix your issue. The reason we don’t support tagging in the body is because Supernotes has very diverse use-cases that don’t jive with that as much as say a tweet or an Instagram post. For example, people use #1, #2 etc a lot, but don’t actually want those to be tags. It also conflicts a bit with markdown syntax, as titles are with hashtags as well.
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I hope you’ll consider it. It technically doesn’t conflict with markdown syntax since markdown requires a space after # to consider it a title (which your app respects). My other issue is when I create a card via email, which is the only way I share links to Supernotes from my iPhone, I would have to share it and then go open it in Supernotes to tag it. It’s too much friction.
The lock-in that comes with proprietary tagging raises my hackles a bit too. Moving from Notion to Supernotes was a bit of a pain, so I want to keep things universal now.
I’ll likely stick to just using #tag and not use the proprietary system, otherwise I wouldn’t be learning from my mistake in Notion.
I also want to mention I understand that the “easy out” I mentioned can feel like a silly request - “give me a way to easily leave your app later!” 
The note taking space is unique in this way, where having that option makes people more likely to try your app in the first place, instead of immediately finding an alternative that is more open.
Just my two cents! I’m enjoying Supernotes a lot and admire your teams work as a software engineer myself.
We definitely want to keep your notes portable. That is the primary reason we’ve stuck with Markdown even though a lot of others in the space have (correctly) recognized that it is not the best format if you want your app to be as approachable as possible.
With tags specifically though, there are a couple reasons we’ve needed to have them not be a part of the markdown proper:
- Aforementioned issues with people using hashtags for things other than tags in markdown.
- we have a concept of personal vs shared tags, which is impossible to do with inline tags alone. Those would always be “shared” and you would always need a separate interface for personal tags.
- Supernotes tags allow whitespace and other special characters which are also impossible with inlined tags.
We actually had inlined tags in the early days of Supernotes, but due to the above issues removed first-class support for them. But as you’ve figured out, you can just do it anyway. Are you having any issues with putting tags in the body and filtering by that search term in the NoteBoard? We would be happy to entertain any ideas that would make this workflow better as long as they don’t interfere with the current tagging system.
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Ahh great point about the shared notes, I hadn’t considered that.
Hm, here’s a couple things that could improve the workflow without interfering with the official tag system.
- A #tag with no space after # is clickable and leads to a search/filter of that tag
- I haven’t figured out how to do an “OR” in the filter view. I see it says “Using AND operator” but I don’t see a way to change it.
Thanks for discussing it!
IMO there are two issues: one is importing notes with tags in the body. Another is adding tags in-line in supernotes
For the in-line problem, Perhaps two different prefixes for each type of tag.
Right here in discourse, typing in-line one hashtag opens the pop-up for categories and two in a row opens the tag proper pop-up. Could be used in supernotes, with shared tags using one prefix and private tags two.
Shared tags stay in the body AND are added to the Metadata of the tag.
Private tags are only added in the Metadata field and are removed from the body once the User finishes editing.
For the importing issue, I think you could have a toggle before the import is done so the User selects which tag they want to use for import: convert all tags to private VS shared.
I found that importing into supernotes is pretty painful as well (for me, from Obsidian). The inline tagging is an issue for sure, and I also find it a little cumbersome first having to use the universal coupler, and THEN type the tag symbol. I’d really like to be able to set individual “instant” shortcuts to access each option in the universal coupler, but also have the universal coupler which is very useful for discovering functionality and helpful when I forget what the options are.
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