Tagging: organize your notes

Tags are notes too. In Alexandria, any note can be used to organize other notes.

Tag basics

• A note can have many tags.
• Tags are more flexible than folders because a note can belong to several groups.
• Tags can be topics, workflows, people, projects, or anything else you want to track.

akb create-tag "Work"
akb tag "Product Ideas" "Work"

Tags with properties

A tag can define structured fields. When you apply that tag to a note, those fields become available on the note.

akb create-tag "Task" \
  --properties "status:select" \
  --properties "priority:select" \
  --properties "due_date:date"

akb tag "Product Ideas" "Task"
akb set-property "Product Ideas" "Task" "priority" "high"

Supported property types are: boolean, select, multi-select, date, number, money, and string.

Viewing a tag's notes as a gallery

Every tag has a view of the notes it's applied to. By default that view is a table - one row per note with a column per property. A tag can instead be shown as a gallery: a grid of cover images with the note title underneath, which is handy for visual collections like books, films, or recipes.

Each card's cover is the first image in the note's body, so add an image to a note and it becomes that note's cover automatically. Notes without an image show a placeholder.

Switch a tag's view with the View dropdown at the top of the tag's page (Table or Gallery), or from the CLI:

akb set-tag-view "Books" gallery   # or: table

The choice is saved on the tag, so it persists and syncs across devices.

Tips

• Keep tag names short and clear.
• Use workflow tags like To Review, Draft, or Published.
• Use topic tags like Rust, Design, or Research.
• You can add or remove tags later, so start simple.