Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude
@unboggling - the difference is in how you use them. Your use of symbol prefixes appears to be as a "shortcut" in the search bar.
I however never expected to type just "*" or "-" in the bar, I always prefix them like tags:- in the rare circumstances I need to refer to them. In my case their purpose is purely to reduce the need for another custom column for something I know only a small % of the books I have will need it set on, so a tag (that sorts to the left by being a symbol) works well for this purpose....
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Shortcut, yes, actually a short-short-cut. and btw, the abbreviations aren't necessary for shortcut to avoid typing fieldnames, colon, and "s. A prefix containing a unique symbol and letter, or symbol and number, combo would work as a search shortcut for spelled out human words too. Such as, instead of !sf or !fn:
(Edit: Sorry, forgot to surround strings with parens if they had a space in them. So put parens around each separate of the following tags containing a space)
!g science fiction OR !g fantasy
if the actual tags are (without quotes): "!g science fiction" or "!g fantasy".
So tag types could each be set up as different combos of 1 symbol with 1 letter. Though I haven't seen a need to get that formal with the tag scheme yet, if necessary I could move to something like this, either without abbreviations or with abbreviations following the symbol combo in the tags, with a space between prefix and tag being optional if applied consistently:
_f(space) or $f(space) indicating Formats.
_fq(space) for Format Quality rating, sorting it to the beginning.
$fx(space) for format problems, sorting those after the quality rating.
!g(space) indicating Book Genres.
!g1space for Primary Genre
!g2space for others, sorting them nicely after the primaries(s).
!k(space) indicating Book Kinds like Short Stories or Omnibuses.
!a(space) indicating Awards. (!a instead of @ which I presently use).
!s(space) indicating SeriesStatus and/or other statuses.
((
Edit: for example, this works great to find short science fiction:
(!g sf) and (!k shr)
or without internal spaces:
!gsf and !kshr
))
The list could go on. Like I said I haven't gone that formal with it. But the merits of a convention like that are: quick and precise informal search without needing fieldnames, with only having to enter 2 extra characters (3 with space) on each tag at initial tag entry (or renaming) to enable it. The merits of using abbreviations instead of full words for the body of the tag are: fast keyboard entry of tags originally and whenever doing searches, and seeing everything at a glance in all "narrow" columns on screen at once, vs wide columns hanging off-screen to left or right or narrower columns needing to scroll horizontally within a column.
I'm not talking about a lot of tags, either. Even when I had over 10,000 books, my combined tag list in Tags column and all Custom Columns was less than 250 tags rapidly dwindling nearer 200 over time, expected to get to 100 to 150 total eventually as I pared things down - if I hadn't trashed those books and started over, allowing an opportunity to rethink everything.