Tagging folders (possibly files)

Hey,

I’ve been looking and it doesn’t seem there’s an obvious go-to solution for this. Which is a little surprising to me - seems like it would be handy for personnel organization of stuff.

I’m basically looking for a way to add multiple tags to some folders (optionally files) as metadata. For instance, if doing a python project that uses Flask with a MongoDB & deployed on Docker, I’d like to be able to tag that root folder with one for each. The idea being that I could then quickly find a project that uses XYZ tech, or also include topics, etc.

Thunar’s Emblem not really cutting it for me - I mean I could get a visual representation, but I’d have to memorize what Emblem I assign to what and the improvement would be minimal.

I know about Thunar’s media tag, but it seems to be purely directed at media file.

I’d be willing to switch from Thunar to whatever offers something decent. I’d be moderately interesting in switching from xfce to another ui (but I quite like xfce).

There seems to be SOME programs that aim at doing that (tagflow, tagspace). That may be an option (if you have experience with either on xfce, opinions welcomed). However I would have a preference for a simple & light solution, and seems to me the best would be something integrated into the file manager system.

Thanks!

Maybe you could consider to use extended attributes, not sure how to show them in Thunar:

File permissions and attributes - ArchWiki
Extended file attributes - Wikipedia
Extended attributes: the good, the not so good, the bad.

I did not know about xattrs. Basically seems to me that if I were to write a tagging program that’s would be a way to do it.

Likely a little more work than what I had in mind. Though I guess once I have this setup it wouldn’t be that hard. Then perhaps I’d be able to use custom actions with Thunar to bring this a little bit further…

Or go the lazy way with one of those programs I mentioned. THanks for the idea - might also be usefule for other things as well.