I’d like to be able to quickly select a bunch of notes that I think are related and put them into a group. I don’t want to have to NAME what they have in common with a tag or a folder. I want to be able to put them together without that.

And I’d want to be able to put a note in multiple such stacks. And to see which stacks a note is in when I click on a note.

Of course if I WANTED to name the stack I should be able to. I just shouldn’t have to. Because often I know things are related, but it's stressful to immediately have to decide why and to name that reason.

Anything fit the bill?

You wrote: "And to see which stacks a note is in when I click on a note."

Wouldn't this require having some way to refer to specific stacks -- e.g., wouldn't this require that the stacks have some kind of name? Are do you just want stacks to start out with something like "Stack1", "Stack2", etc? Or do you want the software to come up with a content-based name?

Perhaps you could try visual clustering, e.g. putting notes next to each other on a canvas in Obsidian or another tool that has a canvas view. The cluster doesn't need to have a name, and you can reuse the note in multiple clusters. If you want to find your note back, use search, since the clusters aren't named.

If you go down the route of having groups with placeholder names like "stack 1" then you can use two-pane outliners that support transclusion and show multiple parents such as InfoQube or Ultra Recall, or notebook programs that allow putting a note in multiple folders like UpNote.

If I understand your question accurately, I think you can do this in Scrintal. You select the notes you want and create a new board with them. You don't have to name the board, it will automatically be given the date as a name. And cards can go into any number of boards.

Zengobi Curio has a feature called a pinboard, which is sort of like a corkboard. Pinboards can have title bars but they don't have names. In general, Curio doesn't use object names. With synchronized text figures you can have a note appear in multiple places, editable anywhere it appears.

Lucas wrote:

You wrote: "And to see which stacks a note is in when I click on a
note."

Wouldn't this require having some way to refer to specific stacks --
e.g., wouldn't this require that the stacks have some kind of name? Are
do you just want stacks to start out with something like "Stack1",
"Stack2", etc? Or do you want the software to come up with a
content-based name?

Good question. I was just thinking maybe it has the title of one of the notes in it (maybe the last one added?)... like a stack of index cards would.

The Brain allows linking notes ("thoughts") to each other without needing to include them in a named group. In fact, this flexible relationshop building represents The Brain's main organising concept.

A benefit of this approach, in my view, is that it caters for overlaps between such groupings. A thought can be associated to as many other thoughts as needed.

digeratus wrote:

I'd like to be able to quickly select a bunch of notes that I
think are related and put them into a group.