From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Karl Voit Subject: Re: Tags management strategies Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 14:23:38 +0200 Message-ID: <2016-05-17T13-59-11@devnull.Karl-Voit.at> References: Reply-To: Karl Voit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:49340) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1b2e2V-0002aP-J7 for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Tue, 17 May 2016 08:23:56 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1b2e2S-0005SX-6W for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Tue, 17 May 2016 08:23:55 -0400 Received: from plane.gmane.org ([80.91.229.3]:43770) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1b2e2R-0005S4-Vf for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Tue, 17 May 2016 08:23:52 -0400 Received: from list by plane.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1b2e2Q-0002Q5-Fz for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Tue, 17 May 2016 14:23:50 +0200 Received: from friends.grml.info ([136.243.234.19]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Tue, 17 May 2016 14:23:50 +0200 Received: from news1142 by friends.grml.info with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Tue, 17 May 2016 14:23:50 +0200 List-Id: "General discussions about Org-mode." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Emacs-orgmode" To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org * Martin Leduc wrote: > Hi ! Hi! > Tags are a very useful feature to filter information in org-mode. Not only in org-mode ;-)[1][2] > After few years of developing a system to organize my life with > org-mode, I realize that tags can become rather difficult to deal > with as we tend to define a lot of tags spread out over several > org files. I can copy this from my personal experience as well from PIM research about tags. Huge field of research. But IMHO difficult to compare: tags of images, tags for arbitrary files, tags for bookmarks, tags for reference management, ... > One general issue is to track all the tags that you have defined in all > your org files. OK, so you already made the evolutionary step from "hey, there are tags - let's use as many of them as possible" to a controlled vocabulary and then a *limited* controlled vocabulary. Good. > Rather than requesting an org-mode feature that would > make a dynamical list of all the defined tags, I personally prefer the > approach of making a static list of all preferred tags in one place and > to try to keep this list as small as I can. That would be my recommendation as well. > I can achieve this by defining a global list of tags through the > variable "org-tag-alist", which allows to access all the tags from > any of my org files, and also because it allows to make > "grouptags" which are very convenient to organize tags by themes. I maintain file-local variables for Org-mode files: #+TAGS: account advertisement agile ... Different files cope with different contexts and therefore the vocabularies overlap very vaguely. For example my business life (professional SW development in an agile enterprise environment) requires totally different tags than my private work with PIM research/tools, contact management, house building, reference management, and so forth. > The latter approach seems however limited to the use of a rather small > number of tags since in the fast-tag-selection interface, tags entries > beyond the 33th are marked with extended ASCCI characters such as ^?, > \200, \201,... So my first question is how can I access these tags, and > if it is possible, what is the physical limit in terms of the number of > tags I can define and access ? I do not use grouptags and tend to (manually) synchronize file tags[2] with my private Org-mode tags. > My second question is a bit more general, but I would like to know what > peoples are currently doing to manage, track and make an efficient use > of their numerous tags. Please do read [2] and take a look at [3] with "filetags.py --tag-gardening". > Many thanks, > Martin I don't want to spoil your tag-erotic but you should probably check-out "Everything Is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger. He claims that the best meta-data is the content/data itself. To sum it up, I can imagine him saying something like "Stop adding tags, make use of advanced methods to filter and re-find according to the content". He has some really excellent points and the book is worth reading it in any case. However, I still enjoy maintaining my controlled vocabulary with tags - especially when working with files. [1] http://karl-voit.at/tagstore/ [2] http://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/ + linked GitHub scripts [3] https://github.com/novoid/filetags -- mail|git|SVN|photos|postings|SMS|phonecalls|RSS|CSV|XML to Org-mode: > get Memacs from https://github.com/novoid/Memacs < https://github.com/novoid/extract_pdf_annotations_to_orgmode + more on github