Vault Tag Taxonomy

A two-level tag scheme built around emoji-prefixed categories. Consistent tagging enables reliable search (tag:#🛠️/neovim), Dataview queries, and MOC coverage analysis.

Canonical Categories

Emoji	Category	Examples
🛠️	Development tools	🛠️/neovim, 🛠️/git, 🛠️/terminal
💻	Programming languages	💻/python, 💻/rust, 💻/typescript
☁️	Systems & infrastructure	☁️/kubernetes, ☁️/docker, ☁️/linux
🔌	Hardware & IoT	🔌/esp32, 🔌/arduino, 🔌/electronics
🏠	Home automation	🏠/home-assistant, 🏠/esphome
🎮	Entertainment	🎮/games, 🎮/tabletop
🤖	AI & ML	🤖/comfyui, 🤖/llm, 🤖/ai-tools

Note-Type Tags

Tag	Meaning
📝/moc	Map of Content
📝/notes	General note
📝/collection	Resource collection
📝/guide	How-to guide
📋/reference	Quick reference material
📋/commands	Command-line reference
📅/daily	Daily note

Consolidation Table

When auditing reveals duplicate or drifted tags, apply these rewrites:

Drift / Legacy	Canonical	Reason
🗺️	📝/moc	Old MOC marker
🔒/security	🔍/security	Standardize on search emoji
🎨/comfyui	🤖/comfyui	ComfyUI lives under AI
gaming	🎮/games	Flat → emoji-prefixed
neovim (flat)	🛠️/neovim	Flat → emoji-prefixed
softwaredevelopment	💻/development	Concatenated → slash
project / projects	💡/project	Pick one plural form
Hardware (title-cased)	🔌/hardware	Lowercase, emoji-prefixed

Bare Placeholder Tags

The tags 📝, 🌱, 📝/🌱 are no-ops left over from unfinished template rendering. Treatment:

• If the note has other useful tags, remove the placeholder.
• If the note has only a placeholder, leave it flagged for manual review — removing would leave the note untagged, which is a different (but real) problem.

Over-Tagging

More than 5 tags suggests the note mixes topics and should be split, or that tags are being used as keywords. Bring it down to 2–3 by asking "what single category is this note about?" — the rest go in the body as text.

Detection

# Notes with a bare 📝 or 🌱 tag on its own line
rg -l '^\s*-\s+(📝|🌱|📝/🌱)\s*$' --glob '*.md'

# Notes with competing security prefixes
rg -l '🔒/security' --glob '*.md'
rg -l '🔍/security' --glob '*.md'

# Flat (non-emoji-prefix) tags
rg '^\s*-\s+[a-z][a-z0-9_-]+\s*$' --glob '*.md'

Edit Pattern

For each note, use Edit with a small old_string / new_string that touches only the affected tag lines. Preserve indentation and the rest of the frontmatter block exactly.

When renaming a tag across the whole vault, batch into one commit titled fix(tags): consolidate 🔒/security → 🔍/security (N notes).

Anti-Patterns

• Do not invent new categories. Use the table above; propose additions via a conventional commit if truly needed.
• Do not use spaces inside tag values (AI tools → 🤖/ai-tools).
• Do not use multiple emoji in one tag (🛠️🔌/esp32 — pick one).
• Do not add tags purely for search — search works on content and filenames already.

Related Skills

• vault-frontmatter — general YAML repair patterns
• vault-mocs — how tag categories relate to MOCs
• search-discovery — runtime tag queries via Obsidian CLI