org: Tag inheritance
6.1 Tag inheritance
===================
Tags make use of the hierarchical structure of outline trees. If a
heading has a certain tag, all subheadings will inherit the tag as well.
For example, in the list
* Meeting with the French group :work:
** Summary by Frank :boss:notes:
*** TODO Prepare slides for him :action:
the final heading will have the tags ‘:work:’, ‘:boss:’, ‘:notes:’, and
‘:action:’ even though the final heading is not explicitly marked with
those tags. You can also set tags that all entries in a file should
inherit just as if these tags were defined in a hypothetical level zero
that surrounds the entire file. Use a line like this(1):
#+FILETAGS: :Peter:Boss:Secret:
To limit tag inheritance to specific tags, use
‘org-tags-exclude-from-inheritance’. To turn it off entirely, use
‘org-use-tag-inheritance’.
When a headline matches during a tags search while tag inheritance is
turned on, all the sublevels in the same tree will (for a simple match
form) match as well(2). The list of matches may then become very long.
If you only want to see the first tags match in a subtree, configure
‘org-tags-match-list-sublevels’ (not recommended).
Tag inheritance is relevant when the agenda search tries to match a
tag, either in the ‘tags’ or ‘tags-todo’ agenda types. In other agenda
types, ‘org-use-tag-inheritance’ has no effect. Still, you may want to
have your tags correctly set in the agenda, so that tag filtering works
fine, with inherited tags. Set ‘org-agenda-use-tag-inheritance’ to
control this: the default value includes all agenda types, but setting
this to ‘nil’ can really speed up agenda generation.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) As with all these in-buffer settings, pressing ‘C-c C-c’
activates any changes in the line.
(2) This is only true if the search does not involve more complex
tests including properties (
Property searches).
Info Catalog
org: Tags
org: Tags
org: Setting tags