This plugin adds a context menu for tags in the Obsidian.md tag pane, with the following actions available:
- Rename the tag (and all its subtags)
- Start a new search for the tag (similar to a plain click)
- Add the tag as a requirement (
tag:#whatever) to the current search - Add an exclusion for the tag (
-tag:#whatever) to the current search - Open a random note with that tag (if you have the Smart Random Note plugin installed and enabled)
- Collapse all tags at the same level in the tag pane
- Expand all tags at the same level in the tag pane
Depending on the current state of the search and tag panes, some actions may not be available. (e.g. expand and collapse are only available when the tag pane is showing tags in a hierarchy.)
Please note: renaming a tag is potentially an irreversible operation: you may wish to back up your data before beginning a rename. See the section on Renaming tags below for more information.
Search for "tag wrangler" in Obsidian's Community Plugins interface, or if it's not there yet, just visit the Github releases page, download the plugin .zip from the latest release, and unzip it in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory. You can then enable it from the Obsidian "Community Plugins" tab for that vault.
Also, make sure that you have enabled the "Tag Pane" plugin, in the "Core Plugins" section of your vault's configuration. This plugin adds a context menu to the pane provided by that plugin, and does not have any UI of its own.
Just like renaming notes, renaming tags involves making substitutions in all the files that reference them. In order to ensure only actual tags are renamed, Tag Wrangler uses Obsidian's own parse data to identify the tag locations. That way, if you have a markdown link like [foo](#bar), it won't consider the #bar to be an instance of a #bar tag.
Because tags exist only in the files that contain them, certain renaming operations are not reversible. For example, if you rename #foo to #bar, and you already have a #bar tag, then afterwards there will be no way to tell which files originally had #foo and which had #bar any more, without consulting a backup or revision control of some kind.
For this reason, Tag Wrangler checks ahead of time if you are renaming tags in a way that will merge any tags with existing tags, and ask for an additional confirmation, warning about the lack of undo. (Not that any renames are really undoable, it's just that if no merging takes place, you can generally rename the tag back to its old name!)
If you are using some type of background sync (e.g. Dropbox, GDrive, Resilio, etc.), and it causes any files to be changed while Tag Wrangler is doing a rename, Tag Wrangler may skip the changed file(s), resulting in a partial rename. Generally, repeating the same rename option should work to finish the process, but in case of merges you may have to be more careful. (It's probably best you make sure any sync operations are completed before beginning any rename operations.)
If many files need to be changed, or if renaming proceeds slowly, a progress dialog will be displayed, giving you the option to abort the renaming process. This will not undo changes made prior to that point, only stop further changes from occurring.
Obsidian allows hierarchical tags of the form #x/y/z. When you rename a parent tag (like #x/y), all of its child tags will be renamed as well.
So for example, if you rename #x/y to #a/b, then a tag that was previously named #x/y/z will be renamed to #a/b/z. (There is no way to rename only the parent tag, except by individually renaming all its child tags to move them under another parent.)
If you want to refactor your tag hierarchy, note that you can rename a tag and its children to have either more or fewer path parts than it did before. That is, you can rename #x/y to just #x, and then your #x/y/z tag will become #x/z. Or conversely, you can rename #x/y to #letters/x/y, which will move #x/y/z to #letters/x/y/z.
Many possibilities are available for refactoring your tags. Just be sure to make a backup before you start, keep track of what you're changing, and check on the results before you sync or commit your changes.
Obsidian allows tags to be specified as part of a note's YAML front matter. Tag Wrangler will attempt to rename these as well as those found in a note's body. However, due to limitations of the parser involved, some whitespace in the front matter may be removed or reduced. In particular, runs of more than one blank line between values are reduced to single blank lines, and spaces between a value and a comment may be similarly reduced in number. (Most other formatting should remain intact, however, and whitespace that is part of a YAML value will be unaffected.)
Tag Wrangler uses the same case-insensitive comparison as Obsidian when matching tags to change, and checking for clashes. Please note, however, that because Obsidian uses the first occurrence of a tag to determine how it is displayed in the tag pane, renaming tags without consistent upper/lowercase usage may result in apparent changes to the names of "other" tags in the tag pane.
Let's say you have a tag named #foo/bar and you rename #foo to #Bar/baz. But in the meantime, you already had a tag called #bar/bell. This might cause you to now see that tag displayed in the tag pane as #Bar/bell, even though Tag Wrangler did not actually replace any existing #bar/bell tags in your text! (As you will see if you search for them.)
Rather, this kind of thing will happen if the #Bar/baz tag is the first tag beginning with some variant of bar that Obsidian encounters when generating the tag pane. Obsidian just uses the first-encountered string of a particular case as the "display name" for the tag, and then counts all subsequent occurrences as the same tag.
This is just how Obsidian tags work, and not something that Tag Wrangler can work around. But you can easily fix the problem by renaming anything that's in the "wrong" case to the "right" case. It just means that (as is already the case in Obsidian) you can't have more than one casing of the same tag name displayed in the tag pane, and that now you can easily rename tags to a consistent casing, if desired.