Tags and folders solve different problems
For me, tags and folders solve different problems. Folders hide notes in discrete buckets — useful for projects, but not great for ideas, because you never know upfront how notes will connect to each other. Tags keep everything visible while still letting you filter, and the real advantage is that one note can carry multiple tags where it can only ever live in one folder. I also use them for status — draft, blocked, review — which I can query directly in a Bases view.
That is only true for the space where I keep my research notes (Slipbox/ZK), because I don't want to predict where my research is going to take me. The rest of my hard drive uses folders for everything else, as usual, because in other places I need to know where to look for things.
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