I use the tag pane to keep track of files that are in-progress, similarly to @tallguyjenks. I put a tag in my templates to make sure that all new notes are marked as “in progress.” In doing so, I can keep track of notes I am working on by checking the tag pane. I delete this tag from notes when they are no longer a work-in-progress. Since my templates include tags, they affect the tag pane. Even if I there are no notes with a tag, the tag will still show up in the tag pane, making me think I have notes that are unfinished, when in reality, there are only templates with the tag.
Proposed solution
It would be great to be able to choose certain files or folders to be excluded from affecting the tag pane. This way, tags would only show up in the tag pane if there was a note, not a template with the tag. This would allow people like me to see if there were any notes that were unfinished with just a glance at the tag pane.
How significant is this problem? It seems relatively minor to have one or two extra files counted against your tags in the tag pane.
For example if you have a tag #unfinished and you know it is in your template and you see in the tags pane that #unfinished has 1 note then you can safely assume it is the template and disregard it.
You are right and this is what I have been doing; however, it would be great if the #unfinished tag only showed up in the tag pane if there was a note that I was working on. Then, I could easily glance at the tag pane to check if there were any notes I was working on, rather than doing subtraction.
I use Quickadd to add tags when creating a new file. The placeholders {{value:tag}} in the templates really mess up the tag pane.
The file count problem is minor, agreed, but still… kinda annoying