TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

I have a couple of points/concerns after a quick read.

1) So 'tag' is the verb that updates the records, but 'tags' is a read?

Poor taxonomy, IMHO. If I'm using "tmsu" I know I'm working with tags, so I'd think natural switches would be the way to go ( tmsu add, tmsu ls|list, &.) Or at least don't make the "create" verb and "read' verb differ only by the plural 'S.'

2) Is there a way to list all existing tags? —not just the ones already bound to a file but all available in the database (with regex filtering, of course).

That's what I'd need to pick from my 'tag pallette' before actually tagging so I could avoid creating synonyms accidentally that'd later require a merge.

i.e. `music mp3 folk` results in a different virtual file system than `folk music mp3`?

I often think of tags as an unordered set, rather than an ordered list.

Here's an article showing how they work for Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/pages/extattrs.html

I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds.

The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it.

Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, and while categories is another helpful abstraction they tend to be confusing if they do not point to a fixed position in a hierarchy in my opinion.

You can also explore a hierarchy; Not so with a cloud of things connected to a bunch of tags.