Tags, consistency and the use of autocomplete

wolff

Any knowledge system that use tags to structure information, like TA, provide to us a wonderful flexibility to design our own workflow, and I see a system like this as a life companion, that preferably will be used for many and many years to come.

The problem though is that the tags used to "stamp" a given zettel will change over time, this can happen because one day we can tag something as "mobile" for example, and on the next month you can tag as "cell phone". This will create a confusion overtime, and that's why, I would like to suggest autocomplete for tags, something like 2Do does.

This wouldn't prevent the misuse of tags, but would narrow the margin for error.

Is this possible @ctietze or @sfast ? If not, how you deal with tags on the long run?

Btw, I wish you both and for everybody, and excellent New Year's Eve!!!

ctietze

Auto-completion to speed up tagging after typing a # sure sounds like a useful addition to me.

Your description brings up another point: Since The Archive doesn't support mass Search & Replace, there's currently no way to change your mind about tags, like replacing uses of #mobile with #cellphone everywhere. Low-level text replacement or a higher level tag manager come to mind.

(Do you want to move the discussion to a general tag-related topic? If not, I'd move the discussion to the TA category.)

Guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr to you, too!

wolff

Hi @ctietze , sure, move the discussion to the general tag-related topic. The autocompletion plus the "search and replace" would be a great addition to TA.

All the best,

Sascha

Hi wolff,

I do a similar thing you describe manually. If I encounter a odd tag that is just a synonym I manually do a search with textmate and make the mass search an replace there.

I have a rough draft for a solution that gives you a simple method to manage synonyms. It is based on a table and gives you a primary tag and the synonyms would be secondary tags.