Tags management strategies

[Martin Leduc <ldcmrtn@gmail.com>]

Hi !

Tags are a very useful feature to filter information in org-mode. 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.

One general issue is to track all the tags that you have defined in all 
your org files. 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. 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.

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 ?

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.

Many thanks,

Martin