Folders tell you where. Tags tell you what.
Every notes app eventually asks you to file something, and the small pause before you answer is the interesting part. Folders and tags are answers to two different questions, and most filing trouble is really the trouble of being stuck on the wrong one.
The filing pause
You write a note. Now where does it go?
Say it's a paragraph about pricing, from a conversation with a friend who runs a bakery. Is that Work? Is it Ideas? Is it Bakery? It is honestly all three, and you have about four seconds of patience for this before the note lands in whatever folder your thumb was nearest.
I have a folder called Misc. You have one too.
It is not a failure of discipline. It is the place the filing question goes when the question has no good answer, and it has no good answer more often than anyone admits.
Where and what
Here is the structural difference, and it is most of the post.
A note lives in exactly one folder. That isn't an app's decision, it's how a file system works: a file has one path. Move it and it stops being where it was.
A note can carry as many tags as you like, because a tag is a word inside the text. Nothing has to move for a note to gain one.
So a folder answers where is this, and a tag answers what is this about. Those feel like the same question right up until a note is about two things, and the notes worth keeping usually are.
Folders are real folders in your notes folder, not a view the app invented, so making one in Finder or Files works exactly as well as making one in the app. On iPhone and iPad, press and hold a note row anywhere outside its title and drag it past a folder's name to file it there. One level of folders shows in the app on purpose; anything nested deeper still syncs, and lists under its top-level folder.
When folders stop helping
Two symptoms, and they arrive in order.
The first is the note that belongs in two places. You either copy it, and now there are two versions with one of them slowly going stale, or you pick a folder and quietly accept that the other route to that note is gone.
The second is worse because it creeps. One day you can no longer find something without opening three folders to check. A structure that used to be a map is now a small search problem of its own.
Both come from the same root. A folder tree is a guess about how you will look for things later, made by the version of you who has just written the note and therefore knows the least about how you will look for it later.
Keep the guess small. Folders work best when there are few of them, when the names are obvious to someone who is not you, and when they describe a place work happens rather than a topic work is about. Clients. School. The book. You can hand somebody a folder like that.
When tags stop helping
Tags fail in the opposite direction. They don't get too rigid, they multiply.
You end up with #idea and #ideas. With #book, #books and #reading, all meaning the same thing on three different afternoons. With a tag you used enthusiastically for one week in March and never again.
The test I keep coming back to: a tag earns its place if you would actually type it to filter by it. If you would never go looking for it on purpose, it isn't organization, it's decoration you have to maintain.
And a tag on everything is a tag on nothing. Put #note on every note and you have invented a slower way to see the list you already had.
Type #recipes anywhere in a note and it becomes a chip you can tap. Tapping one filters the list flat, across every folder at once, which is the whole point: the tag view is the view folders can't give you. Autocomplete offers tags you have already used, which is the cheapest cure there is for #idea and #ideas both existing. ⌘K goes to search.
The hash problem
Deciding what counts as a tag turned out to be the fiddliest small problem in the app, and the fiddliness is entirely other people's punctuation.
A hash starts a heading in Markdown. It also starts an issue number, a year, and a color.
Smolpad's rule is that a letter has to follow the hash. That one line settles most of it: # Heading keeps its space and stays a heading, #2026 stays a year, #1 stays an issue number, and #recipes becomes a tag. Dashes join words, so #star-wars works without needing a closing hash to remember.
Any letter, in any alphabet. That part took a fix. The rule started out as one of the twenty-six English letters, which quietly made tags an English-only feature: #ideen and #idees became tags while #Übersetzung and #élan stayed plain text. Everything after the first character was already Unicode, so the whole failure landed on that one letter. Smolpad speaks German and French. Its tags did not.
Then there are hex colors, which are the reason this section exists.
A design note is full of them. #ee8a1d starts with a letter and would sail straight through the rule above. I measured it against Smolpad's own theme palettes and the CSS behind this site: 43 of the 105 real hex values in there were registering as tags. Not a rare edge case, a third of the file.
So six and eight digit hex shapes are excluded, and the three digit shorthands deliberately are not. #dad, #face, #feed and #ace are all valid shorthand colors and all ordinary words, and a word that silently refuses to become a tag is a worse bug than a color that visibly becomes one. The first leaves nothing on screen to explain itself. If #fff chips when you didn't want it to, wrap it in backticks, which is where a color belongs anyway.
None of this is anything you should have to know. It is here because the rules a tag follows are the difference between tags you trust and tags you stop using, and there is no way to make that choice without making it in public.
What I keep
Four or five folders, named after places rather than subjects. A handful of tags, all of them things I have genuinely filtered by more than once. Everything else stays loose at the top level and gets found by search, which is faster than my filing ever was.
That's it. That's the system, and it took embarrassingly long to arrive at something that small.
If you want one line to carry away: a folder is for the thing you would hand to somebody, and a tag is for the thing you would gather up.
Write first, file later
The pause you feel before filing a note is not a question you need to answer at the moment you feel it.
Write the note. Leave it where it lands. Give it a folder when you know which one, and a tag only when you would filter by it.
Smolpad is a tiny Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It lives in your Mac's menu bar, opens on a keystroke, and keeps every note as a plain .md file in your own iCloud or Dropbox. Free for your first ten notes, with every editing feature included.