Several note applications make a feature of linking one note to another, and of showing which notes link back. People describe it as transformative and I cannot see past it being a hyperlink.
I currently organise with folders and tags, which works. I am willing to believe I am missing something, and I would rather hear a concrete account than an enthusiastic one.
What does linking give you that folders and tags do not?
Where it genuinely pays, from having done it for years:
Where it does not:
That last one is why people bounce off it. The feature rewards writing, and it does nothing for collecting.
The concrete difference is that folders force one place and links allow many, and the cost of that shows up later rather than immediately.
A note about a technique you learned on a particular project belongs in the project folder and in the techniques folder. With folders you choose, and in six months you look in the wrong one. With tags you can have both, which is why tags exist.
What links add on top of tags is direction and context. A tag says these notes share a label. A link says this note refers to that one, and — with backlinks — the target shows you everything that referred to it, without anybody maintaining a list.
That last part is the whole thing. A note about a concept slowly accumulates a list of every context where the concept came up, assembled by you writing normally rather than by you curating. Folders and tags never produce that, because they have no notion of one note pointing at another.
One portability note, since it connects to the storage question: check how the application writes links.
If they are ordinary relative links in plain files, they survive moving to another application. If they are identifiers resolved through a database, they do not, and a migration turns your linked collection into disconnected text.
That is worth checking before investing years of writing in one, and it is not something the marketing pages mention.
@sensor_sarp · last wk.
A practical caution against the enthusiastic version of this: do not build the structure first.
The failure mode is spending weeks on an elaborate scheme of index notes and naming conventions, with almost no actual content, and then abandoning it. The systems that survive grow from writing.
The minimum that works: write notes, link when you naturally refer to something, and let the structure emerge. If a concept gets referred to often, it earns its own note at that point rather than in advance.
Also worth knowing that linking and folders are not exclusive. I use folders for coarse separation — work, personal, reference — and links for everything within. The argument between them is mostly people defending whichever they adopted.
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