Hello !
So I'm not sure if this already exists as an extension ; but I wasn't able to find anything like it, hence the post.[1]
Would it be imaginable to have special syntax to make a word a keyword directly in the note body ?
It could work like tags, but directly inside the note. When clicked, Joplin would show all the notes that have the same keyword referenced in them.
Why ?
Say I am taking notes during a lecture, and the teacher mentions and explains a specific concept that I'll call concept.
I have already learned about concept in another lecture but in a different way. Hence, it is already explained in another of my notes.
But, concept isn't important enough (or I don't have enough information just yet) to create a whole note for it alone. That's where the keyword feature would be useful : I could mark both occurrences of concept as keywords, and when reading my notes I can quickly jump to any note referencing it.
The way I do it as of now is by using footnotes and linking to all relevant notes there, but it's a bit tedious...
How is it different from tags ?
Well it's not really all that different, but :
- A keyword doesn't count as a tag, so it doesn't clutter the tag list. (If you're only going to have 2 or 3 notes referencing the keyword, it feels a bit overkill to create a full-blown tag for it)
- It's created directly in the markdown body of the note. It's both faster when writing than to create a tag, and easier to interact with when reading, as you can just click it.
- It could be made positional, as in when you are in the list view of all notes referencing a keyword, if you click one it points you directly to where the keyword appears. (with the added bonus of providing the full context for the reference, being the rest of the note you were directed to)
Note : It's also different from basic search, since only the occurrences of the keyword marked as such will be returned.
Portability
For the syntax, I was thinking something simple like [[keyword]] could work, since Joplin doesn't have support for backlinks. That way it doesn't really interfere with plain markdown syntax if the user were to ever move to another note-taking app.
Moreover, since you're only linking notes together through words, the same result can be achieved in another app by searching for exact matches of [[keyword]] (or equivalent notation).
TL;DR : Small footprint on export, but no data loss.
So yeah, since keywords would work almost the same way as tags, they may not be too hard to implement. They don't have to be their own separate thing though, they can be categorised as tags for example (then it would make sense to swap out the name keyword for something like inline tag[2])
Anyway, that's another long post, so thank you for reading through :D