NotePlanNotePlan
Jan 10

Create smart folders within Notes

Summary of the proposed solution: Allow users to create smart folders based on some conditions. These folders would be shown with the Notes sidebar section. They can be main folders or subfolders within regular folders. Context on my current problem I am setting up NotePlan to follow the PARA and Zettelkasten systems. I have the folders '30 - Resources', '31 - Reference notes', '32 - Literature notes', '33 - Permanent notes'. I start by creating a note which I add to 31. I include some links there to potencial new Literature notes (e.g. Zettelkasten). If I click that link, it creates a new note in the same 31 folder. So, I need to move that new note to 32 - Literature notes. This is something which won't scale. Potential solutions on my current problem: - Don't use subfolders, just have all the notes under 30 – Resources. And use tags to filter by Reference, Literature or Permanent notes. - Have a smart folder which contains the notes that meet some conditions (e.g. tag=reference-note) In this case, using tags to filter can be enough, although it breaks the sense of the PARA system. However, I believe that allowing to create Smart folders can enable multiple use cases.
PendingPending
Oct 28, 2024

This would be so handy and very appreciated.

Feb 14, 2022

Apple Notes does a nice implementation of Smart Folders that ma be a nice reference

Jan 19, 2022

Interesting point, yes these could be added as smart folders. Just to to figure out where and how to define these rules. Maybe it could be combined with a sidebar filter search. Like you filter the sidebar by a specific name (or starting with `31 - `), then save that filter: [Filter Sidebar Request](https://noteplan.canny.io/general-feature-request/p/filter-n…)

Mar 27, 2025

This would be a great addition to the new note properties! I want to be able to quickly browse notes by these properties, which would create a similar experience to the trending “object” based note apps (AnyDo, Capacities) - eg a Smart Folder for “Type” property could then create a folder for each type, with all corresponding notes in that group. My notes with Type=People would then create a “People” folder in the “Type” Smart Folder. Or “Status” could then create groups for all the categories of status.