Photos, Videos and files - they deserve the same care as our notes, connected with tags and links. that’s the heart of Heaper, my answer to an ever-growing digital heap. We are diving into the concepts and workflows that make this work and what i learned from integrating it into my daily life. I built it as a rock-solid foundation to handle large libraries, treating every file and bit of media as part of a note, all bundled into what I call blocks. Tags don’t just label — they’re blocks too, like dynamic index notes, removing the need for folders entirely and turning a mess of phone pics into something I can organize, the heap as a universal inbox making tagging blocks enjoyable as they feel sorted away. While tags navigate upward through the graph, dynamic filtered views let you navigate relations and content. I focus on self-hosting for privacy, solving sync issues for my 4TB of storage. Take a peek on how I manage my vault and projects from daily notes to watch later lists or kanban boards with just tags. Even look behind the scenes on how I plan on building properties ( like frontmatter) and named relations the same way as tags.
The limitation of folders is that we don’t have context on the folder itself. The core idea of Heaper is to be able to tag and interlink notes, files, media, and documents in the same way. The tags use identifiers, not just text; this allows the user to rename or alias tags without breaking connections. Tag names can also include spaces, which can improve readability; no need for camelcase.
It’s possible to use filters to create different views, and tags can be pinned to the sidebar for easy access. Everything that hasn’t been tagged yet is the heap.
There are two types of tags to facilitate understanding relationships:
Beyond Basic Notes:
Anything that can be a tag should be a tag. Use mentions if needed. However, this could become a complex system that you might never use. Is there a need to overcomplicate things? It’s your system, make the connections that matter to you. It’s important that all apps respect the tags.
App Views:
It’s easy to make custom filters for different views. The user can easily filter items out that they want to keep private.
My Workspace:
Takeaways: