CintaNotes Forum

I've searched through the forum archive and have not yet seen a good explanation as to why uppercase letters are not allowed in tags. My staff and I are reviewing CintaNotes for possible adoption, and this was a repeated complaint among them. One called it a deal breaker. Another said it made the program look sophomoric - like some pre-teen "txtng hr frnd" (his words, not mine!) Can you please explain the reason for the inability to use uppercase letters in tags?

Hi Oxa,

thanks for your question!
Small footprint and highest performance has always been one of the top priorities for CintaNotes. For this reason
the tag system auto-converts tags to lower case, because case-sensitive search is much faster than
case-insensitive search, the latter being highly locale dependent and former using bitwise comparison.
So lowercase tags make tag search faster, including the search which is performed when you pick tags on
the tag sidebar.

There is actually a way to implement fast mixed-case tag search, but it would involve storing every tag name
twice - in mixed case for display, and in lower case for search.
Probably this is the route that CintaNotes will take. But first the task needs to receive a relatively high priority via
votes on the roadmap here:
http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/feedback/ ... s-in-tags/
Please vote there if you'd like to increase this feature's priority. Thanks!

Hello Oxa, welcome to the forum. Having followed CintaNotes development for a while, I want to add that the system we have in place now, about tags and other parts of the interface, is probably the result of some UI design choices, I mean the general trend was always to favour simplicity over complexity, being lean and minimalistic over offering lots of options. Elegant solutions to problems are preferred so that they fit the general identity of the application.

I have to say at the beginning I was disoriented too not being able to use uppercase letters, however over time this feeling changed a lot. Now I feel my need for uppercase was mostly due to my tendency of abusing the tag system conveying too much information in the tags themselves. As a user, now I find very poweful the realtime search feature which I use a lot and fits my needs.

Please note that the tag system is under development and a category system/hierarchy will be introduced in the future. I want also to say that the author is very open to suggestions and we have a whole system to evaluate and prioritize feature at Userecho, while the discussion usually takes place here on the forum.

Hi Alex,
Thanks for your response. The inability to use uppercase in tags strikes me as bizarre, whatever the reason. I've been using computers and software for 30 years, and I have yet to find a program that prevents the user from using uppercase letters. Although CintaNotes has some desirable attributes, my staff and I will continue to review note-taking software to find one that best meets our needs. The ability to use categories such as United States (vs. united_states) will certainly be one of our criteria.

Oxa, thanks for giving CintaNotes a try! Would you like me to notify you when mixed-case tag support is implemented?

Thanks, but I'll just keep tabs on the progress from time to time.