When I did C-c C-q I got the following error org-fast-tag-selection: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p, (100) problem was I missed a dot in ("design" ?d))), it should have been ("design" . ?d))) solution (setq org-tag-persistent-alist '(("setup" . ?s) ("problem" . ?p) ("howto" . ?h) ("using" . ?u) ("ref" . ?r) ("reng" . ?e) ("cmd" . ?c) ("design" . ?d)))