Glossary

collection

An individual top-level Supertag folder. You might have different collections for different broad groups of files, for example, MyPhotos, or MyDocuments or a collection related to all the files in a specific project.

primary collection

When multiple collections are mounted, this is the oldest currently-mounted collection. If a command accepts a collection argument, but one is omitted, the primary collection is implied and used.

tag

A tag is a label applied to a file. Tags show up as directories in a collection. Tags are linked to files in a many-to-many relationship: a tag can apply to many files, and a file can be labeled with many tags.

tagdir

A tag as represented in a collection as a directory.

filedir

A filedir is how you access the intersection of the tags in a path. By default, it is the mathematical symbol for set intersection, ⋂

manifolder

The on-disk folder that represents a collection. It is a portmanteau of “manifold” and “folder”, meant to capture the idea of being a multidimensional organization of files.

intersection

The files inside of a filedir that represents the set intersection of all of the tags in a tagpath.

tagpath

A relative path inside of a Supertag collection, containing only tags. For example, photos/vacations/seattle/2016. It is useful to think about the intersection of files at a tagpath.

tag group

A tag group is a placeholder for collection of similar tags. For example, you may group all of the photos tagged with your friends under the people tag. Then, whenever a person tag would be shown, it will show people instead. This keeps the filesystem from looking overly cluttered.

default collection

The oldest mounted collection that is currently mounted. The default collection is automatically used for operations where specifying a specific collection is optional.

This is a symlink that has the inode and the device id suffixed to the symlink name. You will typically only ever see a fully-qualified symlink in the case that there are multiple files with the same base name, in which case, Supertag will fully-qualify the symlinks before displaying them, so you can distinguish between the two.

pinning

Forcing a tagpath to exist even although no files occupy its intersection. This is a useful technique when creating tags from a file GUI to tag a file with multiple tags at once.