Tag Tactician

Tag Tactician

Better tag management for Obsidian: bulk-edit frontmatter tags, discover related notes through tag similarity, and browse your vault by a hierarchical tag structure.

Features

• Bulk tag operations — add or remove frontmatter tags across many notes (or whole folders) at once, with a live preview before you apply.
• Related notes — a sidebar that surfaces notes similar to the one you're viewing, scored by tag overlap, title, path, and links.
• Tag navigation — a sidebar that organizes your notes into a collapsible hierarchy based on nested tags, so one note can live in many "folders" at once.

Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Bulk tag operations
• Related notes view
• Tag navigation view
• Commands
• Support & contributing

Requirements

Tag Tactician requires Obsidian 1.7.2 or newer.

Installation

1. Open Settings → Community plugins.
2. Turn off Restricted mode (formerly "Safe mode").
3. Click Browse and search for Tag Tactician.
4. Click Install, then Enable.

Bulk tag operations

Add or remove frontmatter tags across many notes in one pass.

⚠️ Back up your vault first. This plugin is still in early development and there is no undo for bulk edits.

How to use

1. Open the bulk-edit modal in one of these ways:
   • Right-click one or more notes or folders and choose Edit tags (frontmatter). (Folders are expanded to all the notes inside them.)
   • In the Search results pane, click the results menu (the icon above the results) and choose Edit tags on N notes….
2. In the modal you'll see:
   • Add tags and Remove tags fields — enter one or more tags, separated by commas.
   • A table of every selected file showing its current tags and a live preview of the proposed result.
   • A checkbox per row to include or exclude that file (use Select all / Deselect all to toggle them together).
3. Review the preview, then click Apply changes to update every checked file at once.

Settings

• Show warning for non-Markdown files — when enabled, non-.md files in your selection are listed with a warning and excluded from changes.

• Tag list style — how tag arrays are written to frontmatter:

  Hyphens (block style):

  tags:
    - foo
    - bar
  

  Brackets (flow style):

  tags: [foo, bar]
  

Caveats & limitations

• Frontmatter tags only — inline #tags in the note body are not modified.
• Invalid YAML — notes with broken YAML or duplicate tags keys are skipped with a warning; fix those manually.
• Large vaults — updating thousands of notes at once can be slow; consider working in smaller batches (a folder or partial selection at a time).
• No undo — Obsidian has no built-in undo for plugin-driven edits, so back up your vault or test on a few sample notes first.

Related notes view

Finds notes that are similar to the note you're currently viewing. Similarity is a weighted blend of tag similarity, title similarity, path similarity, and whether the notes link to each other.

Open it from the command palette: Tag Tactician: Open related notes sidebar.

When a note is active, the view lists related notes. Each entry shows:

1. A link to the note.
2. (Optional) A similarity score — higher means more similar.
3. (Optional) The tags on that note.

The toolbar above the list provides:

• An options menu to show/hide tags, show/hide the score, and refresh the list.
• A filter box to narrow the list by title or tag (matches are highlighted).

Settings

• Show tags by default — show related notes' tags when the view opens.
• Show score by default — show the similarity score when the view opens.
• Hide results with score below — hide related notes scoring under this threshold (default 1).
• Score weighting — adjust how much each factor (tag, title, path, links) contributes to the score.
  • Higher values increase that factor's importance.
  • Set a weight to 0 to ignore that factor entirely.
  • Each defaults to 1.

Tag navigation view

A sidebar that organizes your notes into a collapsible hierarchy built from nested tags. A nested tag such as programming/python acts like a folder — but unlike folders, a note can appear under every tag it carries.

Open it from the command palette: Tag Tactician: Open tag-based file navigation.

The toolbar above the list provides:

• A button to change the sort order (by name, note count, or created/modified date).
• A button to expand or collapse all tag groups.
• A filter box to narrow the list by tag or filename (matches are highlighted).

Settings

• Default navigation sorting — the sort order applied when the view opens.
• Tag group icon (closed / open) — the icons used for collapsed and expanded tag groups.
• File icon — the icon shown next to individual notes.

Commands

Bulk tag editing is triggered from the file/folder right-click menu and the search results menu rather than a command (see Bulk tag operations).

Support & contributing

Found a bug or have a feature idea? Please open an issue on the GitHub repository. Pull requests are welcome.

See CHANGELOG.md for release notes.