Tags are the fastest way to group bullets across your vault without moving them.
Type # followed by a word in any bullet — #idea, #followup, #book, #onboarding-v2 — and you've tagged it. The bullet doesn't move. The tag becomes a filter you can pivot through later.
Inside a bullet, type # followed by the word. That's it.
Look at this #idea later when I have time
A bullet can carry any number of tags. They sit inside its content as inline chips — click one to filter, or just keep typing past it.
Tags are word-boundary anchored. The # has to come after whitespace (or at the start of the bullet) and be followed by [A-Za-z0-9_-]+.
That means # Friday at the start of a bullet renders as a heading, not a #Friday tag — because the heading syntax # has a space after it.
Delete the #word from the bullet's content. The tag listing updates automatically.
There are three ways to land on bullets carrying a tag:
Any #word chip rendered inside a bullet is clickable. It jumps you straight to the Explore → Tags view with that tag selected.
In the sidebar: Explore → Tags tab.
The left rail shows every tag you've used, sized by frequency. Click any tag to filter the right side to bullets that carry it.
/app/explore?tab=tags&tags=<tag> is a shortcut — it lands you in Explore → Tags with that tag pre-selected. Useful for browser bookmarks or sharing a deep link inside your own vault.
This is the key idea. Once one tag is selected, the left rail narrows to co-occurring tags only — tags that appear on at least one bullet already in your filter. Click a second tag and the result narrows to bullets carrying both.
So the Tags view is a progressive filter:
#idea.#idea. Pick #onboarding.#idea and #onboarding.Click an active tag again to deselect it. Multi-tag filters are encoded in the URL (/app/explore?tab=tags&tags=idea,onboarding) so they're shareable and back/forward works.
For tags you reach for repeatedly with the same kind of thing — contacts, books, recipes, meetings — you can attach a schema and make it a live tag: an ordered set of fields and section headings that get filled in as child bullets every time you apply the tag. A date field gets a date picker, a select gets a dropdown, and sections like Agenda / Notes give you a ready-made sub-outline. The tag's table view in Explore → Tags adds a column per field.
Live tags are a Pro-plan feature. See Live tags for the full walkthrough.
Tags are free text. There's no schema, no validation, no "you must define a tag before using it." Make them up as you go.
A few habits that pay off:
#idea and #Idea are different tags. Stick to one.#book-club, not #bookclub or #book_club.#proj-alpha and #proj-beta make the project namespace obvious.A few tags are auto-applied by the app and don't show up in the picker:
#journal — every block on a journal page.You can still filter by them in the Tags view; they're just hidden from the tag rail so it stays focused on tags you actually authored.
Tags and references (((...)))) overlap, and both are useful — for different things.
| Use a tag when… | Use a reference when… |
|---|---|
| You're labeling many bullets with the same attribute | You're pointing at one specific other bullet |
| You don't want to maintain a separate concept page | The target is a real concept worth navigating to |
You want a fast filter ("all #followup bullets") |
You want backlinks on the target |
In practice, most people use a mix: tags for cheap grouping, references for connections that deserve their own bullet.