It would be a good feature to have an additional setting in tags, using which the user can add an alternative prefix symbol for tags than #.
Use case or problem
E.g., As a user, I would like to use # for all basic actions tags, and @ to tag names, and $ to tag stocks.
Proposed solution
In settings, allow the user to add more hash prefixes.
It can be a comma-separated text box
{ $, @, §…}
or a key-value pair
{$ - stock, @ - people, § - topics, . - actions}
Once enabled and configured, the editor will have an autofill option just like hashtags. Also, the Tag Pane will be showing it as a separate set.
Current workaround (optional)
There is no direct workaround for this. Evernote has a separate UI to create tags and allows all kinds of texts and symbols. Obsidian doesn’t support # followed by characters like #$GOOG or #@BillGates.
*The current workaround I am using is #people/Billgates and #stock/GOOG, which is bulky in UI, artificial while writing, and flow breaker while reading! *
I’d like this as well, supporting other common ASCII characters in tags, such as ‘{’ and ‘*’. Limiting special characters to ‘_’ and ‘-’ seems arbitrary. My use case is to create nested tags such as #lang/*/data
I like that solution too. How do you feel about a folder for people and an alias to that folder being @? This way, the link would be @/BillGates or perhaps even @BillGates if the shortcut to a folder could include the needed slash (make it optional).
As of writing, I like including symbols that are html compatable and not any symbol on a keyboard other than - and /. I am hoping that it is future proof since the symbols are standardized in unicode. For example, I use █ for contacts because the “Full Block” looks like a book. The unicode for “█” is (U+2588).
One of my tags for an imaginary person would look like:
I agree. Using the ASCII symbols to prefix types of tags is visually very effective. I too use that in Evernote.
I found I could enter these kind of tags in the frontmatter if I fooled around with the format [“?Tag”] for example. But when I try to use these tags in a block, they can be selected from the tag list, but after they are entered, they lose their tag status and become text. So I was pretty bummed out.