Auto-tagging new drafts in a workspace

I’m still sort of struggling with my workflow. I have a workspace that filters to my drafts based upon a specific tag.

What I’d like to do is automatically tag new drafts with that tag whenever the workspace is active.

Another user here helpfully suggested a long-press on “+” for that option, which is certainly handy on iOS (does this exist on Drafts for Mac?), but it’s not really ideal for speedy work.

Appreciate any further ideas.

Your best bet is to use an action (which you can bind to a keyboard shortcut of your liking).

There’s a New Draft in Workspace example in the default “Tools” action group - or some more advanced options can be found in the directory.

Mac also has a “New in Workspace…” menu command in the File menu.

In all cases, these may need some tweaks to fit how you use workspaces. Workspaces are not containers, and it’s non-determinate what a constitutes a draft in a workspace. Most of these versions rely on a simple tag-based workspace, but not all workspaces are like that.

You could have a workspace that does not filter by tag at all. Or one that has a “red OR blue” tag filter - how would you create a draft in that workspace automatically? Should it be tagged “red” or “blue”?

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100% agree with Greg’s highlights on the nature of workspaces and this request comes up semi-regularly.

This thread from last month covers similar ground and an action for users with simple mono-tag inclusion workspaces.

Thanks for the quick and thorough reply, Greg. I’ll give what you say a try.

— Robert

I’m running into this, too. I get why it’d be impossible to Do The Right Thing in every circumstance (like in the “should it be red OR blue?” example), but maybe there’s a solution that wouldn’t require that kind of calculation at all.

What if keyboard shortcuts could be set per-workspace? Or maybe more broadly, what if action groups or action bars could be activated when selecting a workspace, and would otherwise be inactive?

Suppose I have a workspace called Job, and an action group called Job Actions. There’s an action in Job Actions called “New Job Draft” with keyboard shortcut cmd-N. Further suppose that in the workspaces settings panel, instead of “Load action group:”, we had “Activate action group:”. Then whenever I selected the Job workspace, my cmd-N shortcut for “New Job Draft” would do the right thing to create a draft that met the workspace’s filters.

Drafts wouldn’t have to know or care about my workspace settings at all. It wouldn’t need to be clever and guess what tags or other filters the draft needed. All that would be left completely in the hands of the end user.

Would something like that be possible?

Actions can also access the current workspace, so it’s possible to write a “new draft” action that applies tags based on whatever the current filters are. This one from the directory is a bit naive, but would work fine if all your workspaces are just based on simple tag filters.