A notebook app that writes tags into the file looks portable. Then renaming a tag rewrites every note. A heading that names the notebook looks honest. Then moving a note is an edit.
Dripnex keeps those jobs apart. The organizing page is the contract: notebooks, tags, status, pin, trash, and archive live beside the Markdown. They do not rewrite it.
What you persist as the words is a different decision, written elsewhere. The store is a different decision too — SQLite, not a folder. This is the sidebar.
The problem#
If a tag is a string in the body, organization is a search-and-replace. If the notebook is a folder on disk, a move is a path change and a sync fight. If status is a heading the parser looks for, completing a note is rewriting the note.
The sidebar is a notebook tree. Notes belong to a notebook. You can move one. Click a notebook to focus it; Escape or the breadcrumb home returns to All Notes. Settings → General sets the default used when you create a note from All Notes. Collapsed notebooks list notes from their descendants. Expanded notebooks show their own.
Tags attach. Status is a word: active, on hold, completed, dropped. Pin keeps a note at hand. Trash is soft-delete, restore, or delete forever. Archive hides a note from the default lists without deleting it.
Those fields are organizational. Export is a copy of the stored string. Import is a Markdown folder. The first-run welcome mentions other apps. It does not turn their metadata into headings.
Local data sits in one application folder — ~/Library/Application Support/Dripnex/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\Dripnex\ on Windows, ~/.config/Dripnex/ on Linux. Overrides if you need them: DRIPNEX_DATA_DIR, or --user-data-dir. Don't Sync means they stay here.
One hard decision#
Tags are not the body. Notebooks, status, and pin live in the store. The Markdown is still what you typed.
A rename must not be a rewrite. A move must not be an edit. Completing a note must not insert a heading the next export has to explain.
What I would not do again#
Encode tags as hashtags in the file so "it's portable." Then a rename is a rewrite, and a typo is a second tag.
Put the notebook name in a heading so the sidebar can parse it. Then moving a note is editing, and two parsers will disagree.
The bar#
A sidebar you can rearrange without changing the words, and an export that is still the string you typed. Docs: organizing notes. Live at dripnex.app.