Folders, when you want them
A flat set of personal folders for the handful of things you’re actively working on — file any note, bookmark or emailed article in one click, and browse a folder like it’s its own workspace.
Dexi’s organization has always been emergent: tags come out of your writing, links come out of your thinking, and nothing needs filing. That works beautifully for a body of knowledge — and less well for the four or five things you happen to be working on right now. Folders are for those.
They’re deliberately plain. Create a folder in the sidebar, put a note in it, click the folder to see what’s inside. There’s no nesting to design and no hierarchy to maintain — just a flat list with live counts, plus an Unfiled row for everything that hasn’t been filed. A note lives in at most one folder, which is what makes “where is it?” a question with one answer.
Why it matters
The point isn’t to replace tags — it’s that folders and tags answer different questions. A tag says what a note is about, and one note can carry five of them; a folder says what it belongs to, and picking one is a decision. Client work, a thesis chapter, a launch, a house move: these are containers, not topics, and forcing them into a tag vocabulary has always been the awkward part of tag-only systems. Now #pricing can appear in three projects while each project keeps its own drawer.
Folders cover everything, because everything in Dexi is a note — a bookmarked page, a forwarded email and an RSS article can all be filed alongside your own writing. Captured items arrive unfiled by default, so Unfiled works as an inbox you can triage when you feel like it, or ignore entirely. Filing is metadata-only: moving a note doesn’t touch its content or bump its “updated” date, so tidying up never disturbs your recent-work view. Deleting a folder keeps every note in it — they simply become unfiled again. And your filing is yours alone: even inside a shared team, teammates see the notes you share but never the folders you keep them in.
Who gets the most out of it
- Freelancers and consultants — One folder per client keeps engagements cleanly separated, while tags still let insights travel across all of them.
- Students and researchers — A folder per course, chapter or paper gives each piece of work a boundary — with the whole library still searchable as one thing.
- People with a capture habit — Bookmarks, forwarded newsletters and feed articles pile up in Unfiled, ready to sort into projects in one pass instead of at capture time.
- Anyone who never got on with tags — Folders are the familiar mental model — start here, and let tags accumulate underneath as a bonus rather than a prerequisite.
Example: A freelance designer running three clients at once
You’re mid-flight on three engagements, and your workspace is one long stream of call notes, saved articles and forwarded briefs. You spend two minutes setting up folders.
- In the sidebar you create Acme Rebrand, Northwind Site and Personal — three folders, no hierarchy. Underneath them, Unfiled shows the 90-odd items that have accumulated.
- You open Unfiled and work down the list. Each note’s menu has “Move to folder”, so a client brief, two competitor teardowns you bookmarked and a forwarded email from Acme’s marketing lead all land in Acme Rebrand without leaving the list.
- Before a call, you click Acme Rebrand in the sidebar and get the whole engagement — your notes, their emails, the articles you saved — as its own view. The count next to the folder name tells you it’s grown to 34 items since kickoff.
- Filters still stack on top: inside Acme Rebrand you filter to #typography, then run a semantic search for “what did they say about the wordmark” — scoped to that client, not your entire workspace.
- Meanwhile #typography stays global. Clicking it from the tags page shows every typography note across all three clients and your personal reading — the cross-client pattern you’d lose in a folders-only tool.
- When the Northwind project wraps, you delete the folder. Every note survives and quietly returns to Unfiled, still tagged, still searchable, still in your graph — a closed project rather than a deleted one.
Folders for what you’re working on, tags for what you know. Two minutes of setup, and neither one has to fight the other.
Try it in your own workspace — free, no credit card required.
Get started