Ability to have notes in “folders”
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Wish there was a way of being able to file notes into folders (on the left).
Yes, the tags are a halfway house, but when you have several 1,000 notes and the only way to group stuff is via tags, it can be very difficult to manage.
Tags require you to remember the tag you need and therefore by their very nature not efficient and can even be wasteful when you randomly allocate tags that are very similar to previous tags; but you just can’t remember what the tag was.
The other advantages to folders (saying the obvious here) but:
- Being able to export notes from just one or selected folders
- Being able to ‘share’ a folder and all notes within
- Easily finding content!
- Being able to sort folders or have them in a user-defined order
- etc etc.
The list is endless really. Taking on best of practice, this is why we moved from MS-DOS v1 (No folders! yes I remember those days) to MS-DOS 2.11 which had folders. That day was a celebration.
Folders these days are essential for organising and managing large knowledge bases. PLEASE add them!
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Hi. Given that this has been discussed in this forum for many years, it seems unlikely that the venerable Simplenotes app will suddenly sprout a new organization structure. But you can make better use of tags.
First, you can arrange the tags sidebar by name or in a user-defined order.
Second, you can add multiple tags to the same note. Say you have data grouped by year and month. You can search for “tag:2025 tag:august Jones” to find all entries containing “Jones” in August 2025. The tag search items are ANDed together. Multi-tagging is also useful to collect a subset of notes related to a specific topic even though they may be in disjoint categories.
Third, if you create a new note while viewing the list for a given tag, the note will automatically have that tag, just like creating a file in a folder. And when you add tags to a note, the autocomplete feature helps you to use existing tags.
Finally, you can lose stuff in hierarchical folders too.
And a suggestion. If you have several 1,000 of notes, I hope you keep periodic Exports of their contents, to protect against possible catastrophe. We see regular posts here from users who have lost everything.
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Hi John
Thanks for the detailed reply. Pretty much how I use GMAIL and other Google products. I find it a real pain as the “Folders” system of organising at a top level has been around since the inception of PC’s. Seems odd the reluctance to use best practice.
We have ended up with what can only be called a ‘work around’ which at best is not good enough. I love the product of course (hence still using it) and revert to it all the time having used about every other product that is out there (been an IT person for over 45 years now).
A notes app is always useful. A notes app that is fully useable is a world beater. I would say SimpleNote has the potential to be far more successful than the small minority of people using it currently. Having taught gmail, and all other google apps for many many years the first question on any course is “Where are the folders…?”. Yes I do explain the similarity with ‘tags’ but tags are just made up on the spur of the moment (almost) and to get consistency over a large notes base if neigh on impossible.
Seems an obvious move for them. Yes I have read ALL the previous comments about Folders! And yes my question was not born out of no one else mentioning it, more lack of any enthusiasm by the authors to provide adequate feedback, timeline or actually implementing the feature (if you can call folders a ‘feature’ these days!).
SimpleNote is a great system, make no mistake. Not much out there that is as ‘simple’ and useful. That does not mean it cannot be improved incrementally with base features.
For interest everything I do (files, folders, notes, events, etc etc) I prefix with the date as in 20250819 (year/month/day) as a matter of course and that works with all apps including the horrendous Windows Explorer. I can find ‘stuff’ using fuzzy date logic in seconds using the ‘Everything’ app (https://www.voidtools.com/) – that combination is very useful for most everyday stuff and other things embedded in calendars, emails, files, notes, folders, etc.
Anyway I guess there are certain of us that cannot accept this lack of a key feature, even if there are kludgy workarounds and will keep pressing them. For interest even in WordPress we have Tags AND Categories. Categories being those things that could be on more than one post and tags being random keys if needed.
Thanks again
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“Seems an obvious move for them.” “That does not mean it cannot be improved incrementally with base features.”
And who would pay for these “base features”? The existing user base, which exploits this free service on multiple platforms with automatic cloud syncing? The subset of those users who might grudgingly pay $5/month for the enhanced service? Two such subs for a year might cover 1 man-hour of dev time. The commercial/paid notes app field is already pretty crowded with providers offering various feature sets and pricings. I believe none supports all six platforms supported by Simplenote.
I believe the existing Simplenote, derived from the original Simperium version, stores the notes in a database, which can be easily synced with the Simperium cloud service. Changing to a files and folders architecture would hardly be an incremental change. More like a total rewrite. And it would need to be supported across iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and the web app. This could be a substantial challenge for unpaid volunteer developers.
“Small minority of people using it currently.” Have you any data for the size of this minority? Seems like this is something only Automattic would know. And maybe they don’t want it to become a large minority.
“Tags are just made up on the spur of the moment (almost) and to get consistency over a large notes base if nigh on impossible.” If you use tags as if they were folders, they are not made up on the spur of the moment. When I create a note, I very explicitly place it in one tag. And if it relates to other common topics, I add those tags as well. No spontaneous choices. I have over 1200 notes, and they’re all pretty well organized, so I can find related items easily.
Cheers, John
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