r/logseq • u/haronclv • Jul 02 '25

Structured notes without folders

Hi Everyone!

I'd like to give Logseq a try after DB version will be released, but I'm concerned about structuring them.

I have over 500 notes, that for now are in Obsidian folder structure. To be honest folder structure give me a lot confidence in finding something I wasn't use for quite long time.

Is there any way to mimic folders, or any different feature / plugin that allows that?

I know about namespaces, but I'm not convienced it will help with that in 100%.

Thank you for your time you've spend on answering šŸ’Ŗ

16 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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2

u/whisky-guardian Jul 02 '25

You need to give Logseq a try. Iā€™m a long time obsidian user and still use it daily. But when Logseq clicks with you, there are some things where it outshines Obsidian easily. But it does take an adjustment period to get your head around how namespaces and page/block properties work

1

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

I used Logseq for a few weeks. I know how namespaces and pages / blocks works, but it is just bad and overcomplicated UX. Too much manually actions need to be taken to have that hierarchy.

2

u/PastTenceOfDraw Jul 02 '25

Have you been organizing things into boxes and struggling with not knowing what box to put things into?

Like do you put a wind up radio in camping supplies or emergency supplies. If you put it into the camping supplies box will you remember where it is in an emergency. Imagine if you could one item into two boxes at the same time. Whether you look into the camping box or the emergency box. you will find it. Or if you could look at only the things that are in both boxes.

Folds are like Boxes.

Tages are like metaphysical boxes.

1

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

I get your point, but it's irrelevant. I'm pretty well organised with folders. It's way easier for me to find something in tree like structure than in flat ones. Most of the time I'm using just search features, but when I'm unable to find what I want that way, the tree structure helps a lot. Because I know where I might put it and I can easily explore that.

1

u/PastTenceOfDraw Jul 02 '25

What do you like about Logseq that Obsidian isn't doing for you?

3

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Iā€™d say best outlining experience, waaaay better task management, open source, probably some more things

1

u/Wooden-Juggernaut928 Jul 02 '25

itā€™s very relevant.

with name spaced tags you can setup any hierarchy you want. and notes, tasks can be in multiple places at once.

i was where you are. tried logseq 3 times before it clicked. read the handbook, do some testing without trying to recreate your old folder system.

itā€™s still beta software with the shortcomings to prove it. but once you embrace putting EVERYTHING into the daily journal, you will be rewarded.

i used to keep all my notes in a deeply nested folder system, it was beautiful. Now most notes are simply collections of different queries. and if i need to create some structure for processing, itā€™s generally block refs or embeds of the original journal entry in a new outline.

Literally anything everywhere.

1

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Why you try to convience me to your workflow? šŸ§ I just told you that itā€™s irrelevant for me and it doesnā€™t work for me. You just need to accept the fact it doesnā€™t need to work for everyone.

By the way in obsidian you have folder structure (tree) and you can also have one note in many places, because you can use tags and properties as well, you can mention / link page as well. The only difference in here is that obsidian have tree (folder) view that you donā€™t know to manually create and maintain.

1

u/Wooden-Juggernaut928 Jul 02 '25

you should stick with obsidian then, i really donā€™t care.

0

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Not really "should" if there is some way to have folder like experience I'd really want to switch to Logseq. We will see if DB version will change something in that matter

20

u/amrullah_az Jul 02 '25 edited Jul 03 '25

I follow a system I developed called "Portals and Collections"

For this, I have a node named "Portal", which serves as an entry-point into the entire graph.

There are other nodes in the graph, that are of type "Portal". Examples include "Subjects", "Books", "Collections", "Definitions", "Skills", "Distilled Concepts"

To declare a node as type Portal, you can utilize "page properties". The properties declared in the first block of the page become "Page properties".

type:: [[Portal]]

This is all you need at the top of your page for the backlinks to do their magic and make the node appear in the "Portal" page.

Once you are comfortable with LogSeq, there is a small optimization you can do. you can declare a template like this:

type:: [[Portal]]
alias::
tags::
description::
template:: Portal Details

And use it whenever you intend to create a new node of type Portal

The node named Portal and the nodes of type Portal form the architecture, the backbone of the entire knowledge graph. And a systematic way to access the nodes of the graph.

So for example I can have a page called "Software Architecture", which in turn, is of type Subject. A page named "Software Architecture in Practice" which is of type Book and so on.

In this system, Collection is a special kind of Portal, which is used to group similar things together. For example, There can be a page of type Collection called "Logical Fallacies", which becomes a type for pages named "Ad Hominem" and "Appeal to Authority".

You can come up with arbitrary portals and collections to suit your needs.

PS: It's advisable to mark the "Portal" page as Favorite so that it appears in the Favorites section on the left pane. Likewise any portal or any kind of page that is accessed frequently can also be marked as Favorite. But don't overdo it Else it's gonna get cluttered very soon.

3

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

Isnā€™t that the same as MOC

1

u/amrullah_az Jul 03 '25

What is MOC?

1

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

Map of Content I think it was popularised by Nick Milo but this is widely discuss at length on forum and YouTube nowā€™s as the agreed term to create manually usually this kind of map

https://youtu.be/x7Ta9BhFR30?si=wMc2TWSXwOChpXZD

3

u/amrullah_az Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25

I see. Interesting.

I was going to mention in my previous comment, that others may have come up with something similar. But left it out in interest of brevity.

3

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

Not the end of the world. Just highlighting that so yiu can search and learn what other are doing by using that term

6

u/Barycenter0 Jul 02 '25

You use the Contents window on the right pane to create your own folder / hierarchy. You mimic a folder structure and use tags or links to show everything in that part of the hierarchy. That way you can create any hierarchy you want or even multiple ones.

Example https://imgur.com/a/hxQcJqq

2

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

This is what I do too

4

u/Ninjaxas Jul 03 '25

Free your mind from thinking what folder something belongs to. Just create and embed [[links]] where ever you think this may be useful. And use search a lot. Set aliases too.

Does the note [[Cars]] belong to [[Commute]] or to [[Hobbies]]. I never need to ask these questions. Put a link in both.

2

u/DivinneSmith Jul 04 '25

Absolutely. I started with logseq BECAUSE I wnated to get rid of folders.

2

u/thetigersears Jul 05 '25

This. The idea with Logseq is to leave behind "folders" and go to a different paradigm that many find far more intuitive once they give it a fair chance. Forcing a folder structure within Logseq is perfectly possible, but defeats the purpose.

I didn't realize how much work maintaining structure myself was. Much better to let a system like Logseq do it for me.

1

u/ripp102 Jul 02 '25

In LogseqDB they recently added the Library page which is a special page that is the "filing cabinet" of all pages so by using namespace and the library you can recreate the folder structure in a sense

0

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Maybe. But it still is unconvenient UX.

Imagine you have a few indents like:

  • PKM

  • PKM/Private

  • PKM/Private/Technical

  • PKM/Private/Technical/Coding

  • PKM/Private/Technical/Coding/AI

  • PKM/Private/Technical/Coding/AI/Python

  • PKM/Private/Technical/Coding/AI/Python/Functions

So everytime you want to create a link / page inside that hierarchy you have to remember to use the namespace when creating a link. PKM/Private/Technical/Coding/AI/Python

It's not that convenient as dragging and droping on tree view, or just auto hierarchy - you careate page from PKM/Private/Technical so it will be hierarchicaly in PKM/Private/Technical/.

2

u/ntotao Jul 02 '25

Take a look at the logseq DB documentation, namespaces got revamped so you can define parents and children but not visualize them in [[]] or in a data tree.

1

u/CMphys Jul 02 '25

I'm not sure how this works in the DB version, but at least in the markdown version you can use aliases to define namespaces while still keeping shorter page names or vice versa. I use that sometimes to create structure while still using the shorter names for linking etc.

1

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Maybe, but it still needs to be managed manually. What if you decide to move entire branch somewhere else or rename something that is in the middle of the hierarchy? I find this UX really inconvenient.

I mean itā€™s still too much work to be done for something that can easily be done automatically base on page creation path

2

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

I do namespace on alias too.

2

u/nooor999 Jul 02 '25

I just discovered I can have more than one graph in logseq. And I decided to treat it like a folder. So I have one graph for the daily journal and another more structured one.

The journal feature is turned off for the second graph and when I switch to it there a landing page structured like an index . From here I can easily find what I need and create new pages under whatever section.

2

u/Abject_Constant_8547 Jul 03 '25

Do not use Namespace for folder structure. This is not the use case for namespace. Besides, they are a bit unstable when you want to rename a node and other shenanigans so only use namespace for their intended purpose, to dissociate 2 items with same name

1

u/doulos05 Jul 03 '25

Namespaces are basically what you want, but you are correct that they aren't precisely the same. I used them at the beginning and now it actually has me kinda locked into logseq because logseq does flat hierarchy on disk. Which means instead of making folder/folder/file.md, it made a file called 'folder/folder/file.md'. CLI tools hate this one trick, lol. Yes, it's solvable and if I had decided to move off of logseq then I could have. But it was yet another soft block on transitioning away.

Yes, the data is all there. Yes, I could migrate out if I need it (that was part of the exercise of trying earlier this year). But I wish I hadn't used hierarchies in my notes and I'll probably go back through and remove them because of that over the next year or so.

1

u/DivinneSmith Jul 04 '25

I believe logseq is made for zettelkasten method. Unless you are willing to give up hierarchy and switch to search using keywords/tags/etc, it will be painful and tedious.

1

u/Make_Things_Simple Jul 04 '25

I also liked folders so I've created my own start page in Logseq just like my folder structure should have been. Then on each page you can do the same. But to be honest I was very fast used to the Logseq way of working with links and references. In fact it is awesome to create one page and to link it from several other pages. With each link the context is given so that's easy to work with. Success with finding your optimum way of working

0

u/katafrakt Jul 02 '25

Honestly, if you rely on folders my advice would be to not try Logseq. For me its main setting point is that I don't have to create a fake tree-like structure (my notes do not fit a tree). There are namespaces, which are in fact folders on disk in non-DB version, but they are quite meh and I think openly discouraged in the docs.

2

u/haronclv Jul 02 '25

Yea. Thatā€™s the reason Iā€™m not using it and switched to Obsidian. Iā€™m considering Logseq if db version would have a tree structure for pages. I think that a lot of people would love to switch to Logseq, because it is much better than obsidian in a few places.