Colored Notes

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#1

Hi all, new Agenda user here and really enjoying it. Looking forward to Agenda 14 but until then I wanted to talk a little about a use case I’d love to be able to handle in Agenda.

I treat Agenda a bit like a project management tool, less of a task manager, at least in some ways. Due to this, my Agenda projects all have a pinned to the top note that has outside resources and a bit of an overview of the project and goals. This is also where I’ll put tags that help me quickly and easily find what I’m working on right now. I see it very much as an organizational note.

That said, there are other types of notes I would like to be able to easily see. I’d love if I could color code my notes. Think faint light colors, for example, when you’re writing in a note on the Mac it’s a very light yellow. I’d love if that color could stick around and have options. For instance. If I want a note to be a more formal status update, and the project is on time, it be green. If the project update is showing the project behind, allow the note to be red. So that’s the first part of this request, just simply let someone choose a color for the note and let that stay and be visible.

The second part is more of a workflow. I.e. Color code notes based on tags or people. Some sort of tooling that lets a note get a color applied to it automatically. I could see a variety of ways this would work but I think something simple to start with is best, then see how people use it and iterate on it from there. But personally, when a tag is applied a color is set.

#2

I agree that would be nice. Today, I use emoji in the note titles to indicate that kind of status.

#3

That’s a neat idea. I’ve tried that in the past but always found it hard to always find an emoji that properly conveyed the idea.

Something that might be kind of useful is perhaps expanding the color option to provide note “categories” which then inherit a color? Maybe you could set a “Status” category and that category has a particular color associated with it. This could also put some sort of marker/indicator under the note automatically that matches the category name.

That might be more powerful because you could also search by that category to get a list of status updates for instance. Even more powerful might be only the most recent category from each project. At that point in my example, I’d have the ability to see the most recent status update for every single project I have.

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#4

There are some simple ones that I find effective – if you do an emoji search for square or circle you’ll find several color options:

image

image

There are more, and they’re kind of in the middle of the list / mixed around, but they’re there. Often times it’s easier for me to use simple colors rather than a particular image.

Also, emoji do work in “open quickly” filtering, but do not work in “search all”. I hope that changes.

I understand. Given everything on the Agenda roadmap, I always try to suggest a way of working that people can implement immediately. Colored notes, categories, statuses etc could be nice… who knows if or when they’ll ever happen. For now, you can use a #tag to group notes by status for search all, and emoji for visual distinction. Or note prefixes such as [WIP].

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#5

We won’t be introducing this directly in Agenda 14, but we might take a step in the right direction. We are adding colored tags, so you could have a system of adding a colored tag at the start of each note. That will draw the eye, and can be used for overviews etc.

Not what you requested, but maybe a small step in that direction.

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#6

That is already very nice. Colored tags will definitely help me.

#7

I second this- I thought I couldn’t find a way to change the note color. Only having yellow notes makes it hard to visually differentiate things, especially on the Agenda view.

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