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Nested Category Hierarchies

Category names support / as a hierarchy separator. Reference/Postgres, Reference/Postgres/Indexing, and Daily/2026-04 all coexist; the Notes sidebar renders them as nested folders, the MCP list_notes tool gains a categoryPrefix filter, and the warehouse / publish pipelines need no changes — categories are still plain strings on disk.

Authoring

Nothing about how a note is created changes. The "New Note" command opens a Quick Pick of known categories — type a fresh value with slashes (Engineering/Outage Postmortems) and that becomes the new path. Existing notes pick up nesting automatically the next time the tree refreshes.

The configured-categories setting (markItDown.notes.categories) accepts slash paths too, so you can pre-seed an empty workspace with a tree:

jsonc

Each scope (Workspace / Global) lists its root categories — distinct first segments across the configured + in-use sets. Expanding a category shows:

Its child categories first (alphabetical), then
Notes that live at that exact path (most recent first).

So Reference could expand to Networking, Postgres, then any notes whose category is exactly Reference. Reference/Postgres would expand to Indexing (a deeper child) plus its own notes.

The displayed label is the last segment only; hover the row for the full path tooltip.

MCP filter

list_notes accepts:

Field	Behaviour
`category`	exact match (unchanged)
`categoryPrefix`	matches the path itself or anything underneath it (`Reference` matches `Reference`, `Reference/Postgres`, `Reference/Postgres/Indexing`)
`tag`	tag filter (unchanged)

The filter is greedy on the prefix only — siblings like References/Foo do not match Reference because the comparison uses path segments, not raw startsWith. Trailing slashes in the prefix are tolerated and stripped before matching.

Implementation map

File	Role
`packages/core/src/categories/path.ts`	Pure helpers (parse, join, hasPrefix, rootCategories, childCategoriesAt)
`src/notes/notesTreeProvider.ts`	Tree builds nested segments via `childCategoriesAt`
`src/mcp/notesAdapter.ts`	`listNotes({ categoryPrefix })` uses path-segment match
`src/mcp/server.ts`	`list_notes` input schema gains `categoryPrefix`

Backwards compatibility

Existing flat categories ("Drafts", "Daily") render exactly as before — they're just one-segment paths. category filters in MCP still work. The warehouse _index.json is untouched (categories are always plain strings). No migration needed.

Limitations

The Notes sidebar doesn't yet support dragging a note between categories. Use the existing Move to Category… action.
Renaming a parent (e.g. Reference → Refs) doesn't bulk-rename the children — you'd have to re-categorise each note. Bulk-rename is a natural follow-up.
pickCategory shows raw paths in a flat Quick Pick. A two-step picker (root → child) is a future polish; the flat list is fine while category counts are small.

Testing

$ pnpm dlx vitest run tests/unit/categories

14 tests cover the pure helpers (parse, join, hasPrefix exact + descendant

sibling rejection + empty-prefix wildcard, root collection, child collection at root + at depth + grandchild de-dup + parent-skip).