Tinderbox supplies a number of 'designator' terms, use of which instead of a note's $Name or path which may infer an individual note, or in a few cases a group of notes. Item designators are generally hierarchical in their references.
There are also separate series of designators designed to help date creation/calculation and the polarity of links.
Most item and group designators can use paths to refer to data from a different note from the current context. This makes them even more flexible in use - the section on paths for more detail.
Designators are generally used with attribute value references ($Name(parent)), as action or export code parameters (linkTo(grandparent), linkFrom(grandparent(original))). In some cases cases they are specific to certain operators, as with links() and the link direction designators.
By convention designators are normally not quote-enclosed in action code. Although they are strings, not using quotes helps Tinderbox's parser to identify them as designators as opposed to notes of the same name.
Designators ignore map adornments.
In action code, designators used as path proxies - e.g. $Name(parent) - may safely be quoted. Historically, path arguments weren't quoted but in v5 there has been a move to explicitly quoting all string values.
Designators are listed via their scope: