Question about tags and connection between notes

I know this is more of a taskpaper thing, but:

  1. Do you have any plans for making a way for different .bike files to connect together?
  2. Do you have any plans for being able to add a tag?

The more I use Bike, the more .bike files I’m ending up with, and this means my data is starting to pile up between .bike files. I don’t have a great way to pull it together. I can live without tags for the moment by just using search. But I don’t know of a way to search across multiple .bike files. Would be nice to be able to find a certain phrase or word (or tag) ever time it is mentioned in any of my .bike files.

I’m guessing you’ve already thought about this lots…

Bike has I think a good linking system. Use Edit > Copy Row Link and that will copy a URL that when activated will open that Bike outline and then focus the row. You can then paste that link into a Bike document, or anywhere else. More info on links can be found here:

Yes, there was actually just some recent related discussion here:

Generally (I think) Bike will model tags similar to how TaskPaper does. The interface might be different. And its likely a while until I start implementing them, but I do plan to.

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Yes, I love the current linking system.

I described this wrong. What I’m looking for is a way to search across multiple .bike files (inside them) for certain key phrases, words, etc.

I’ve been making a new .bike file as a daily work journal and am realizing that over time there will be certain themes I’ll want to access across files, if that makes sense.

I’d like to be able to quickly make a .bike file, and feel like I can find the info I put there later on, without opening and searching a bunch of different files.

Ah, got it.

Someday I hope to build a “workspace” option for Bike. I expect that will work by allowing you to open a directory structure and then browse/search the contained files as you might with a programming IDE.

That’s still a long way off, similar to iOS client. I expect maybe after Bike has 1 year anniversary I will decide which of those paths to take.

In the mean time remember that .bike files are just html files.

  1. They are indexed by spotlight, so you can use spotlight searching
  2. It seems to me there must be existing tools to search directories of HTML files in interesting ways… but I don’t actually know what they are. Maybe I’ll get some responses here.
  1. Ah. I assumed because .bike was a new extension that it wouldn’t be searchable by spotlight. I’ll mess with that a bit.

  2. I’ll be watching that thread.

Roadmap makes sense.

Another thing I thought about doing is putting all of my work journals in a single .bike file and just zooming in each day… then I can easily search them all from within Bike. That’s how I treated Taskpaper.

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I think that can work now, but can work better later. In particular Bike has no sidebar “index” of projects right now, so navigation in large outlines isn’t so easy.

That’s ANOTHER thing that I plan to add. Probably after I start supporting other row types. Then maybe I’ll put headings in the sidebar. This is all expected, but not promised.

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Love it. You’ve got such a great foundation going already. Excited to see it unfold.

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Maybe DEVONthink can do something about this.

The left column shows the bike files found,
the middle column shows the preview of the file (which can be modified directly),
and the right column shows the keywords found in the file (which can be jumped to the corresponding position).

The unfortunate point is that DEVONthink is a commercial software that charges a lot of money.

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Such an insightful solution (DevonThink) for my use case, a solution right in front of my eyes that I never considered. Like @Nathan Bike’s ease of use quickly made it central to my daily workflow. I have a daily log/journal and multiple project focused files and I use @jessegrosjean 's copy row move and Hook to cross-reference. But I wanted something more like the workspace idea.

@eno I already own and use DevonThink so didn’t need to worry about the cost of yet another software purchase. I use DevonThink (DT) mostly to read and archive my many academic articles, but with your tip here, I set up a Bike folder to Index in DT and voila, I can watch and search all of my projects. Nice tip. So often we need someone else to point out a solution that is right in front of our eyes. Thank you.

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Searching across all .bike files, or a set, would be great. But I am so glad your focus has been on a top quality (above top quality with some of the editing innovations) editing experience first, and other stuff maybe later.

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I added .Bike as a searchable type for EasyFind, and pointed EasyFind to a specific folder (where I keep Bike docs) and it works a treat :slightly_smiling_face:

Update: I just realized that although EasyFind is not DevonThink (thanks @eno for that idea), but it is the same company that make DT; EasyFind is just a free-tier mini app they provide – so for ppl who don’t own DevonThink, this seems a great alternate solution.

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