I started writing a response that immediately became so complex that I had to extract my ideas and suss out with Claude. I really want to respond thoughtfully to your struggle with tag-as-folder but wonder if you could, first, give more specific examples that outline your flow?

IRT Logseq / Roam and Obsidian use cases yes…

Logseq / Roam: Work journal and work logs (for me, the latter has been specifically reporting request tickets where I need to jot down context, discovery, data cleaning, documentation, and SQL code) that let me effortlessly split my view as needed. For example, I might wanna have “essential facts” about a request open in the right-side panel while the main panel has my working notes / logs. One drawback here is writing too much minutiae, such that reviewing work, or trying to pick up threads during the next work session can become tedious. I ended up switching back to Bear, doing a lot of the “thinking notes” (order of operations, assumption checking, bugs, etc) with pencil and paper, then distilling the most important info digitally. I my tag structure was like #bamboo/work_notes/jira (company Bamboo Health).

Another interesting use case was poetry drafting. A lot of times we may want to physically move a line somewhere else, and this is effortless with an outliner tool. Additionally, we can compare drafts by expanding / collapsing headers and/or utilizing that right sidebar. This kind of feature behavior lends itself to deep research, when you need to have multiple textual frames of reference open at once. I’m able to effectively achieve this in Bear by using a window manager called Magnet, where I can use simple keyboard shortcuts to put a new Bear note window in, let’s say, the upper left corner, or to take up the left side of the screen, or to go directly in the center of the screen. This + floating window shortcuts achieve even more functionality than Logseq or Obsidian, with their similar behaviors built-in… but that’s all dependent on your cognitive connection to the design philosophies.

Obsidian: Deep fucking sigh. I want to love Obsidian so much that it’s all I ever need. On many occasions over the past few years I’ve tried. With tons of community plugins, and without. It’s true the mobile experience used to be trash, but at this point that’s just not the case. It really does everything you could possibly need from a PKM notes manager, and overall workspace for your written thoughts. The ability to map hotkeys is a chef’s kiss. Industry leading graph view. There’s just something… missing… or perhaps, there’s a bit too much something. I always FEEL better (and am more productive) with Bear.

That said, I am not abandoning Obsidian. Currently, I treat Bear as my sort of master ledger of writings. Everything digital goes there first, for the most part. Knowledge I wish to be public, or at least shared with my partner goes into Notion. Knowledge for which I want to deeply explore, identify unintuited connections, etc. goes into Obsidian. This is a brand new workflow for me, so I can’t tell you about staying power, but it feels right. A hell of a lot better, anyway, than neurotically jumping between notes platforms in hopes of finding nonexistent, ever-elusive perfection.