Are 'documents' and 'files' the same?

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#1

Some feedback from a new user (and fan!)

The terminology around ‘items’, ‘documents’, and ‘files’ seems strange.

There’s a File Pane, which refers to ‘files’.

Then there’s this wording in the ‘Move to…’ dialogue

item%20vs%20document
item%20vs%20document842×140 3.5 KB

This implies that ‘items’ and ‘documents’ are different. So, I’ll assume that any bullet point or checkbox is an ‘item’.

Does this mean a ‘document’ is a ‘file’? If so, the wording in the tag panel is confusing. It refers to ‘Document tags’, but their search narrows based on which ‘item’ is currently zoomed into.

Am I missing something, or is this unnecessarily confusing? Is this behaviour of the tag panel a bug, or should ‘Document tags’ simply be called something else? If the latter, IMO there’s a sensible feature request to have actual 'document/‘file’-level tags in addition to ‘all’ and the current ‘visible/onPage’ tags. That behaviour would work better for me than either of the current options.

Is Document intended to mean ‘the visible part of the current file’s hierarchy’? If so, it’s a strange choice IMO. The majority of conversation on the forum seems to use ‘document’ to mean ‘file’.

#2

Clarification: file = document + folder. I agree it’s confusing; we wanted to be precise back then, since the file pane contains more than just a list of documents.

Soon I think we should replace all occurrences of “file” unless it really means “document AND folder”.

Regarding “document tags”, it contains all the tags in the current document (or “file”, if you prefer), regardless if it’s visible or not. The name “document tags” is the opposite of “global tags”, so you can think of “document tags” as “local tags” if you’d like, but we thought “document tags” is more precious.

Clicking on a tag in “document tags” will search for tag, under the current context. If you take note of the number of count, you’ll see that it’s for the current document/file, not the currently visible hierarchy.

I make that clears things up.

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#3

Hmm, almost :slight_smile: It depends what you mean by ‘context’; apologies for being persnickety with language, but I’m interested in whether the following is expected behaviour or not.

See this video

When I’m zoomed into either of the two headings, the tag count shown is for the entire document (4 tags), but the search invoked by clicking on the tag only shows the currently visible tags (2).

For my workflow, this behaviour is very inconvenient, and drives me to using ‘All tags’ instead, even though this creates search crosstalk between my personal and work-related documents.

#4

“Context” = current zoom level

If you’d rather search the entire document, please first use the breadcrumb or use the keyboard shortcut to go to the top level of the document.

I agree it’s confusing; the tag count says “4” but you can only see “2” when you click on it. However, if things behave like you described, it’s harder for people to get the current behavior. They’ll have to manually type in the tag name, as search terms disappear as you zoom in.

I hope that’s understandable.

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#5

OK; it is understandable, I just wish it behaved differently :slight_smile: It’s impossible for it to behave exactly right for everyone without becoming a preferences nightmare :+1:

#6

Yeah, but maybe we can do our best to make things work for both.

Something like Alt+Click to search in document top level. But that would be too hidden.

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#7

This is a ‘me centric’ suggestion (I have no idea how others use the current combination of All and Document tags), but perhaps something along these lines is worth considering?

  • The Tag pane only shows a single list of tags
  • In the pane header, there’s a ‘scope’ option with three choices
    – Global (or All?) Selected by default
    – Document (showing all in document, instead of the current behaviour)
    – Zoom (or Focus?) This one seems the most risky, as it’s least clear to me why it’s desirable, though that’s my bias talking! Maybe just needs a better name.
  • This scope applies to the tag number shown in the pane, and to the search scope

This assumes that most people don’t want to switch between tag ‘search scopes’ frequently.

#8

Thanks for the suggestion, even if it’s “me centric”, suggestions are always useful to us :slight_smile:

To anyone who’s reading: like the OP’s post if you want something like this!

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