request: streamlined tagging

I tend to capture dozens of items and tag them later. the tagging is kind of awkward and tedious. there are two flows I use:

  1. tagging with mouse in the tag window. this is useful when I haven’t been tagging recently and don’t remember what all my tags are. however, I have too many tags. they don’t all fit in the tag window, so it has a scrollbar, which makes it harder to scan the list and harder to select the tags I want.

I think I’d like a compact view of all my tags, perhaps bubbles alphabetized and flowed like a paragraph of text. I don’t care about tagcloud size changes. it wouldn’t be too hard to make a hundred or so tags easily available. select/deselect tags can be a single click toggle.

  1. tagging with keyboard. cmd-shift-t is a bit awkward to type, but that’s not a big deal. a bigger problem is: say I’m viewing “unread” tags, going through them and retagging them. after I edit the tags for a record and press return, the record disappears from the “unread” list. now, no record is selected, and it’s unclear to me how to select the next record using just the keyboard. nothing I’ve tried works. it’s not even clear to me where keyboard focus is.

I’d like eaglefiler to be a bit more like mail programs. when I do something like delete/refile a record in the current list, it autoselects the next record in the list.

The keyboard focus is on the records list, but there’s no selection. You could type the Up or Down Arrow key to select the first or last item in the list, or begin typing the title of a record to select it. There’s already special handling in place to auto-select the next record when you delete. I’ll see if this can be extended to handle selections that become empty for other reasons.

Thanks for the suggestions.

EagleFiler 1.4 adds a Tag Cloud window, which shows a flowed list of the tags and lets you toggle them by clicking.

cool. the tag cloud helps a lot. thanks!

To make tagging of multiple items more convenient, could you allow <cmd><shift>t to allow editing of the tag set for all selected items. That would save keystrokes and be more intuitive than <cmd><shift>b <tab><tab> …

Also, could you allow “redo” immediately after a tag set edit to copy that tag set to to the newly selected item?

In the batch command window, could you enable <cmd>a to and <cmd>r to select the radio buttons?

I’m working on making this smoother, but there are some cases where Batch Change will still be required; the tags bar interface doesn’t make sense if the selected records have different tags.

That’s a feature I’d like to add.

The radio buttons already have shortcuts.

If nothing else, maybe allow it for those circumstances where the tag sets are identical?

That’s the plan.

And maybe, when the sets differ, offer the intersection with <cmd><shift>t and the union with <cmd><opt><shift>t?

The keyboard shortcut just shifts focus to that field. The tag names in it still have to auto-update for display purposes…

Is that a problem? I was thinking that would be expected behavior – i.e., the intersection or union would be applied to all selected records so that the user could edit that resultant set across all the selected records.

Also, as another convenience, would it make sense to allow copy and paste tags from one record to another (w/, say, <cmd><opt>c and <cmd><opt>v)?

Right now, the tags bar always shows the tags of the selected record. Command-Shift-T simply moves the cursor there. Are you suggesting that Command-Shift-T should instead change the tags of the selected records to the intersection?

I will consider that; thanks.

Yes – and the following:

  • Undo immediately after Command-Shift-T would revert to the original differentiated set.
  • If the user modified the tags, one Undo would revert to the intersection, and a second Undo to the original differentiated set.

This is implemented in EagleFiler 1.5.