Area Picker

A right-pane widget that lets you assign or change the area of the currently active note — or of a whole note-tree selection at once — plus a Missing Areas page that finds every note that still doesn't have one.

Configuring the area list

Open the addon's settings note — from the launcher, or with the cog button in the picker widget's header — and use the Areas tab to add, remove, reorder, rename, or recolor areas:

• Enabled controls whether an area appears in the dropdown and in the Missing Areas page.
• Row order is the dropdown order. Use each row's move-up/move-down controls to rearrange.
• Key is the stable identifier behind the stored #area value. Renaming it after notes are already tagged orphans their #area label.
• Title is the text shown in the dropdown.
• Color, if set, is mirrored onto #color whenever this area is assigned.

Click Save to persist your changes.

If the active note's #area label points at a key that is disabled or not listed, the dropdown shows "⚠ Invalid: <key>" rather than reporting the note as having no area.

Assigning to several notes at once

Select notes in the note tree (alt-click, shift-click) and the picker retargets at the selection, the way Trilium's own bulk actions do: its header reports how many notes are in play, and picking an area writes it to all of them in one go. With nothing selected it stays on the active note. Targets that currently disagree show a "— Mixed —" entry rather than letting one note's area stand in for the rest, and notes caught by an exclude filter drop out of the selection, so the count is what actually gets written.

What updates do to your areas

Thirteen areas ship with the addon. Each one keeps tracking future versions for as long as you leave it alone: if a later version renames or recolors one, the change reaches your install on the next update without asking. Once you edit an area it is yours, and is never overwritten. Should a later version change that same area, TAM's Update Review shows your version against the new one, one area at a time, and asks which you want rather than deciding for you. Areas you added are never touched, and an area you deleted stays deleted.

What lands on a note

Assigning an area writes its position in the list in front of the key: the seventh area, keyed career, tags the note #area=07-career, and mirrors that area's color onto #color. The prefix is what makes anything that sorts or groups by the raw label — a board view, a saved search, a sorted child list — follow your configured order instead of the alphabet. It is derived from the list itself and never stored in the config, so moving an area changes what later assignments write.

Maintenance

The picker writes the color and the prefix only at assignment time, so notes tagged earlier keep whatever they were given. The Maintenance tab restates both on the notes you already have. Each button reports how many notes it changed, how many were already correct, and how many it skipped; both read the saved config, so save your changes in the Areas tab first.

• Recolor tagged notes sets #color on every note whose own #area names a listed area, to that area's current color (an area with no color has #color removed instead).
• Reapply order to tagged notes rewrites those notes' #area to the area's current prefixed value. It matches on the key alone, so career, 03-career and 07-career all land on the current NN-career — outdated prefixes and notes tagged before prefixes existed are both covered.

Notes that only inherit #area are left alone, since they inherit #color too, and notes whose #area names no listed area keep what they have and are reported as skipped.

Missing Areas

The Missing Areas tab lists every non-hidden note that has no #area label, one at a time — title, tree path, a content preview, and a button per enabled area to assign it on the spot. Assigning an area drops the note from the list; "Start over" replays it from the top. The same triage queue is also its own page, on its own launcher note, for reaching it without the rest of the settings.

Exclude Filters

The Exclude Filters tab holds a registry of named Trilium search queries. A note matching any enabled filter's query is dropped from what the picker writes to and skipped by the Missing Areas list — use this for notes that intentionally never get an area (e.g. note.type = code or a specific subtree). A filter with a blank query is ignored; an unparseable query is skipped rather than breaking the rest.

Upgrading to 4.x labels

Before this version the picker stored the bare key (#area=career). Those notes keep working — the widget, the triage queue and both maintenance actions read prefixed and bare values alike — but they sort by name until you run Reapply order once.

What the prefix does break is anything of your own that matches the exact value: a saved search or exclude filter written as #area = career wants #area %= '\d+-career' (or just #area *= career), and other addons that read #area see the new value too. agenda-overview@beatlink is the one to check: its dimensions registry deliberately stores order-free keys and agenda-organize@beatlink compares #area against them, so its triage queues will read prefixed notes as misfiled and offer to write the bare key back. Keep the two apart, or give their area values the same prefixes.

Upgrading from 2.5.x

The areas setting changed from a plain ordered list to a registry (stable per-row id, an Enabled toggle, Add/Remove controls), matching how template-picker@beatlink's Templates tab works. If you already have areas configured, run migrate-areas-config.js once, manually, before updating — it converts your existing areas config in place so your customized areas, colors, and order survive. See that script's own header comment for exact steps. A fresh install with no prior config has nothing to migrate.