[idea:tags]concept2026-08-20

Tags

You can add tags to any idea. Tags work as a lateral filter across many ideas that you can use to group windows on them, group outlines, or otherwise organize them.

#idea(
  "meeting-notes",
  tags: ("draft", "review"),
)[ ... ]

When creating new ideas or windows, you can set show-tags: true to demonstrate

#window(
  "meeting-notes",
  show-tags: true,
)

This will render pills next to the idea’s ID, just like you see above. The colors associated with each tag can be configured in your rookery’s theme.

You can also work backwards, getting tags from an idea:

#context tags-of("meeting-notes") // -> ("draft", "review")

Concepts

[idea:1]What is the genealogy of idea?

An idea in a rookery can be conceptualized as an atomic note of sorts, which is why each idea is given its own standalone page. As with notes in other Zettelkasten-inspired systems, ideas that link to each other produce backlinks.

In addition to the sense of an idea as a ‘Zettel’ or note, you can also think about them as slightly more general kinds of ‘todo’ item, as in Org-mode TODOs. Indeed, the notion of ideas comes from the IDEA variant in Doom Emacs, a preconfigured cluster of plugins for the Emacs editor.

The sense of an idea as the base for more structured kinds of notes such as todos is one of the reasons that rookery ships #tagged-idea, a factory (curried) function that projects can use to create #todo or other kinds of more structured ideas. Though there is no inbuilt sense in rookery that allows one idea to depend on or be blocked by another, for example, you could augment these more principled ideas using tags as a metadata system.

[idea:ideas-reference]Ideas reference

The ideas function returns an array of dictionaries that each have the following structure:

Field	What it holds
`id`	The full ID, prefix included—`"idea:etal"`.
`name`	The same ID with the prefix stripped—`"etal"`, the form you write in `#window("etal")`.
`title`, `text`	The title as content, or `none`; and that title flattened to a plain string, `""` where there is none. Take `text` for matching and sorting, `title` for rendering.
`tags`	The idea’s tags, in the order you gave them—which is not alphabetical, and not quite the order they were written, since `#note` and `#todo` prepend their own.
`body`	The idea’s body flattened to a plain string, `""` where there is none. Matchable and excerptable, not renderable—for rendering, see `#idea-body` below. A nested idea’s text is excluded, since it registers separately and owns its own.
`href`, `page`	A link to the idea’s minted page: `href` measured from the page you are calling on, `page` from the site root. Both `none` where nothing mints pages.
`minted`, `updated`	The idea’s dates, or `none`.