TagSpaces is “an offline, open source, file manager. It helps organizing your files and folders with tags and colors.”
The software is an attempt to build tagging into file management, but one of the obstacles it faces is precisely that–for reasons I will never understand–file tagging has never been something that OS creators prioritized (though Apple has certainly done a better job than Microsoft on this point).
So TagSpaces tries to create an OS-independent tagging system which relies on using one of these two methods:
- Adding the tag to the file name, such as:
filename-[tag1 tag 2].txt
or - Creating hidden sidecar files that contain the tags, so you might have:
filename.txt
and then a hidden file like:
filename.ts
where all of the tags are stored in the the filename.ts file (which is simply a text file).
The first option is incredibly unwieldy and ugly, in my opinion. The second option works better, except that you have to pay a lot of extra attention when copying or moving files to ensure that the accompanying tag file is also copied or moved with the actual file. (You could simply use the TagSpaces application for all file management, but I suspect that would be a nonstarter for most people).
Overall, I like and use TagSpaces, and it does the best it can to route around the limitations of most popular file systems. But those are still pretty big limitations that it is trying to overcome.