Mentions & hashtags

What smart tags are

A smart tag is a small colored pill embedded in your text. There are two families:

• @mention — who: people, teams, companies, places, products.
• #hashtag — what: projects, ideas, topics, statuses.

Every tag becomes an entity in your Knowledge Graph. Tag @Sara in five different notes and Nomima knows they’re all about the same person — her Smart View lens, graph node and entity card collect everything in one place.

Creating a tag

1. Type @ or # followed by a name. A suggestion menu appears with matching entities you’ve used before.
2. Press Enter or Tab to accept the highlighted suggestion — Tab always accepts the suggested tag, so you can type two letters and let Nomima finish the name.
3. If the name is new, the menu offers a Create new row for each type — pick the type right there and press Enter. That’s the whole decision: there’s no follow-up “which one did you mean?” picker afterwards.
4. Press Esc to dismiss the menu and keep the text plain.

The menu suggests the type for you. For a brand-new @mention whose name Nomima’s offline gazetteer recognizes, the Create new rows lead with the predicted type as the Enter default — @Microsoft → Company, @London → Location, @Sarah → Person. A name it doesn’t recognize leads with No type, and No type plus every other type always follow so you can override in one keystroke. Hashtags get no predicted type — they lead with No type.

Identity is name + type. An entity is unique per name and type, so @Apple the Company and @Apple the Product happily coexist as two entities — but you can’t pile up two Companies both called Apple. Got the type wrong? Change it from the pill’s entity card and just that pill re-points to the right entity.

Ghost suggestions: as you type ordinary text, Nomima may show a faint dashed preview of a tag it recognizes (type “Mo” and see @Moe ghosted ahead) with a small ⇥ hint. Press Tab or click it to convert; Esc dismisses it for that spot. You can turn this off with Settings → Smart Tag Types → “Suggest Smart Tags as I type”.

Built-in types

Each tag has a type that controls its icon, its color everywhere (pill, graph node, minimap dash), and which Smart View lens it appears under.

Status is special: the Status type powers Nomima’s universal completion system. Stamping #complete on any block marks it done everywhere — see Complete & incomplete. Status tags also drive Kanban columns.

Select (option) tags

Some tags hold a single chosen value instead of acting as a free-form label. Select tags — like Priority or Severity — let you pick one value from a dropdown rather than typing a new one each time. They behave like a fixed set of options, so in a Database you can sort and filter rows by them cleanly. (This is distinct from a normal multi-value #hashtag, where you’re free to coin new tags as you go.)

Custom types

You’re not limited to the built-ins. In Settings → Smart Tag Types you can:

• Add a new type to either family — pick a label, an icon from the icon gallery, and a color.
• Edit built-ins — change a type’s icon or color (its family is fixed).
• Delete custom types you no longer need. Reserved types like Status can’t be removed.

Custom types get their own color in the Knowledge Graph legend and their own grouping in search — they’re first-class citizens.

Entity cards & attributes

Click any pill to open its entity card — the hub for that person, project or thing:

• Appears in — every notebook and block that references the entity, deduplicated and clickable.
• Attributes — add arbitrary fields to an entity: an email and role for a person, a URL for a company, anything you like. Attributes are stored durably with the entity, not with any single note.
• Custom icon — give an entity a photo (a person’s face, a company favicon) and the pill shows it everywhere instead of the type icon.
• Essential fields — each type keeps the fields that define it: a Person always keeps Name and Email, a Company a Website. You can leave them blank, but they can’t be deleted by accident.
• Type schema — in Settings → Smart Tag Types you can define which attribute fields a type should have, so every Person card offers the same fields by default.

Auto-photo from email. Type a person’s email and Nomima quietly fetches their Gravatar photo if they have one. The address is hashed before any lookup and never sent in the clear; if there’s no match, nothing is stored — and it never overwrites a photo you uploaded yourself.

Profile tab. When an entity has an email, its card gains a Profile tab with public info looked up on demand by hash — name, location, bio, the organization inferred from the email domain, and any public social accounts. It’s fetched only when you open the tab.

Entity relationships

Attributes describe an entity on its own. A relationship is a durable, typed link between two entities — @Sara member of @Design team, or #Launch owned by @Sara. Because it’s stored against each entity’s stable identity, a relationship survives graph rebuilds and shows up from both sides automatically.

Creating a relationship

You don’t draw links by hand — you add a relation field to an entity, and every value you put in it becomes a link:

1. Open an entity card and choose Add field → Relationship.
2. Under Links to, optionally restrict the field to one type (a Person, a Team…) so the picker only offers the right kind of entity.
3. Nomima shows a live “How it reads” sentence spelling the link out from each side. Two chips (this entity and the other) sit around an editable verb — type your own forward wording (manages, owned by) and the reverse wording for the other side. Leave them blank to accept the sensible defaults (contains / belongs to).
4. Save the field, then pick the target entities. Each one you add creates the link and mirrors it onto the other entity’s card.

Direction, cardinality & the container

• Direction — the forward verb reads from this entity outward; the reverse verb is what the other entity shows. A symmetric link (like colleague of) reads the same both ways.
• Cardinality — set the field to hold Just one target or Multiple. A person’s Team is usually one; a team’s Members are many.
• The container — a checkbox, “…is the container (members inherit it)”, marks which side contains the other. This is what powers inheritance below.

Inherited relationships

Containers chain. If @Sara is in @Design, and @Design is in @Acme, then Sara’s card also shows @Acme as an inherited relationship — rendered muted, labelled via @Design. Nomima walks the containment chain up at query time, so inherited links are never stored: delete the Design → Acme link and Sara’s inherited Acme quietly disappears. Only container (membership) links propagate — an ordinary link like partners with stays put.

Where relationships show up

On an entity card, relationships are read-only and grouped one row per label and direction — a team shows Members: @Sara, @Moe on a single row rather than one row each. Each target is a real pill in its own type colour, and clicking it jumps to that entity. The Knowledge Graph folds these authored links straight in as labelled edges between nodes.

Read it like a sentence. The verbs you type are the whole point — pick wording that reads naturally out loud (“@Sara reports to @Moe”, “@Moe manages @Sara”) and every card and graph edge stays legible.

Pill behavior in the editor

• Pills are single units: ←/→ step across a pill in one keystroke, and Backspace removes it in one keystroke.
• Hover a pill for a tooltip showing its type.
• Country flags — a @location mention for any of ~200 countries shows that country’s flag inline. It’s rendered entirely offline as an emoji, no lookup required.
• Pills work everywhere text does — inside task titles, reminder labels, section summaries, callouts and table cells.
• Pasted text gets tagged too: SmartCopy converts @names, #tags and dates in pasted content into real pills (and is smart enough to leave code comments alone). See Paste, templates & shortcuts.

Why bother tagging?

Tags are the fuel for everything downstream:

• Smart Views — open the Person lens and see every person with their open work, progress bars, and checkable items.
• Knowledge Graph — entities become glowing nodes connected by what you wrote.
• Smart Scrollbar — every tag paints a colored dash on the note’s minimap so you can see at a glance what a long note contains.
• Home — group your daily agenda by @mention or #hashtag instead of by time.