Taggable Tags

This plugin is feature-complete, but still in testing. Test it in a test vault or a copy of your vault before installing it in any importent vault

Taggable Tags

A powerful Obsidian plugin turning tags into taggable tag notes, and optionally maintaining a folder hierarchy synchronized to your tag hierarchy.

Philosophy

• Folders are unatural for categorizing knowledge. Every group can be a part of multiple other groups.
• Tags should be notes. Every note can become a tag. Your tag hierarchy is a note hierarchy.
• Create notes without thinking of categorization, and categorize as you go. Don't plan ahead.
• Don't count on always and everyone having software that parses tagged tags. Maintain a fallback folder organization.

Obsidian's website says invites you to "Invent your own personal Wikipedia". Categories have their own page with text, and can have several parent categories. Obsidian tags should work the same.

Main Features

• Tag Notes: Create notes that corrospond to a tag in your vault by adding a "tag" property to the note with the tag's name. When hovering over a tag and holding ctrl, you will see a preview of that note. Ctrl + left-click will open the note.
• Automatic tagnote creation: When you use a new tag anywhere in your vault, automatically create a corresponding tagnote file.
• Tag hierarchy via tags: Tag your tags by adding tags to the tag's note and the plugin will automatically index all the child-parent relatioships between tags and files. This allows a many-to-many relationship between tags (unlike nested tags which are strictly hierarchical).
• Tag Explorer view: Explore this structure with a file-explorer-like sidebar view that shows your tags as both folders and notes (like in the folder notes plugin). Each tag can be clicked to open its corrosponding note, and expanded to show its child tags and notes. Items with multiple parents appear under each parent.
• Graph view: Tag nodes and tagnote nodes in the graph view (both global and local) are combined so you can see all the tag-tag, tag-file, and file-file relatioships in your vault.
• Filtering: Add tags as positive or negative filters and view only a subset of your tag tree. Click a tag in a note frontmatter or body to add it as a filter.
• Rename sync: If you change the tag property in a tag file, all usages of that tag throughout your vault are updated. You can also use the "Rename tag" command to rename a tag everywhere at once.
• Folder syncronization: recreate your tag hierarchy as a folder hierarchy based on the first tag of each note, so if you or someone else ever needs to access your notes without access to software capable of parsing tags, a sensible hierarchy will still exist, and mirror your folder structure in tags so you can still interact with folders without breaking the tag-folder corrospondence.
• Tag manipulation: There's a bunch of useful tag manipulation features like deleting, splitting, combining, rearranging, and renaming tags which means you never have to think about your tag hierarchy in advance of creating notes or tags.
• Migration wizard (WIP): Since most users will want to use this plugin with a collction of notes that is currently based on folders for organization, the plugin has a migration wizard that helps you easily trnasition from one workflow to the other. This feature is currently a work in progress, it still doesn't work well even with my own vault.

How it works

Tag file detection

Tag files are identified by a frontmatter property (default: tag). The value of this property determines which tag the file represents. This means:

• File names can differ from tag names (the file Python Language.md can represent the tag #python)
• Changing the tag property value will rename the tag throughout your vault
• You can organize tag files in any folder structure you prefer

Example

1. Use any tag in your notes, e.g., #python
2. A tag file is automatically created with a tag property:

---
tag: python
tags: []
---

3. Edit that file to add parent tags:

---
tag: python
tags: [programming-languages, data-science-tools]
---

4. Now #python appears under both #programming-languages and #data-science-tools in the Tag Explorer

More features

• Multiselect: The explorer view supports selecting multiple items. Different options are displayed depending on which and how many items are selected.
• Tag manipulation
  • Create child/parent tag: Context menu action to create a new note and make it either a child or a parent tag of selected tags.
  • Merge tags: Select two tags in the explorer view, right click one of them to open the context menu, and select 'Merge tags'. A modal will open where you can choose which tag will merged into the other. The remaining tag will have the combined children, parents, and content of both tags.
  • Merge tag into parents: Context menu action for tags with one parent which deletes the tag and replaces all its instances with instances of its parent.
  • Split tag: Context menu action for tags with multiple parents which deletes the tag and replaces all its instances with instances of its parents.
  • Create tag from filters: Option that appears when filtering for two or more tags. Creates a new tag and replaces all instances of the tags with it in files which apply to the filters. Can be reversed with "split tag".
  • Rearrange tag order: A command that lets you change the order tags are listed in the active note (since obsidian doesn't have a good native way to do that). This is mainly useful for the folder syncronization feature which is based on tag order. Otherwise tag order doesn't matter.
• Exception tags: Each tag has an "exception to" property. Put the name of another tag there, and notes tagged with both tags won't appear under the latter. e.g, If there's a music album you like, but there's one song there you don't like, make #disliked an exception to #liked, tag the album with #liked, and that specific song with #disliked. Now when you look at that album under the #liked heading, you won't see that song. You can also write "all" as the property value, and this will make children of that tag appear only under that tag. This is useful for tags like #archive and #private.
• Tag registry: When inserting a tag in obsidian, obsidian gives autocomplete suggestions for tags that already exist. If you have a tagnote but haven't applied its tag to any note, obsidian won't suggest that tag in autocomplete. There's no way to directly add autocomplete suggestions, so as a workaround, there's a setting for creating a tag registry note that gets tagged with all the tags (and gets properly filtered from the explorer view and the graph view) so they always appear in autocomplete suggestions.
• Attachments: Attachments (any non-markdown file) can be shown in the explorer view even though they can't be tagged directly. An attachment is considered "referenced" if any note links or embeds it. Turn this on with the Display attachments setting, then choose:
  • Group attachments: show attachments inline, under a collapsible "Attachments" group, or under a group split into "Referenced" and "Unreferenced" subgroups. When splitting, subgroups only appear if a group contains both referenced and unreferenced attachments. A group with only referenced attachments lists them directly under "Attachments", and a group with only unreferenced attachments lists them directly under an "Unreferenced attachments" group.
  • Display referenced attachments alongside referencing note: show referenced attachments next to the notes that reference them — either in addition to or instead of the vault root. Unreferenced attachments at the vault root will always be shown here.
  • Additionally, if an attachment lives in a folder that is connected to a tag (via folder synchronization), it is shown under that tag even if no note references it.
• ****:

More obscure features and details are covered in Q&A.md

Roadmap

• There are currently no additional major planned features

Commands

• Open tag explorer: Opens the Tag Explorer sidebar view
• Rearrange tags:

Settings

• Auto-create tag files: Automatically create tag files for new tags (default: on)
• Confirm orphan deletion: Show a prompt when a tag file becomes orphaned (default: on)
• Force lowercase tags: Automatically convert all tags to lowercase (default: on)
• Tag property name: The frontmatter property that identifies tag files (default: tag)
• Sync file names with tag names: When enabled, renaming a tag file will update its tag property, and changing the tag property will rename the file (default: off)