There is an aspect that I found about recently, related to tags, that is very confusing.
The documentation and the team say that when we add a tag to an item, it creates a replicant.
But this isn’t true.
The behaviour is different depending on whether we’re talking about an ordinary tag or a group tag:
- If it’s a group tag, the Instances dropdown in the Generic Inspector of that item will indicate that there are multiple replicants and allow the user to navigate between them.
- But if it’s an ordinary tag, this does not happen! It will still say “0 replicants”. And this makes sense.
The term “replicant” is being used for two distinct situations. Why?
This makes it very confusing for the user(s).
When I observed this, I searched this forum and found the Tags, Deleting, Replicants? thread from another user (@romebot) that also had the same confusion regarding tag deletion and replicants.
I also pointed out this issue of the overloaded usage of the term “replicants” in that thread (here and here).
I can understand that, perhaps in the DEVONthink source code, the implementation is similar for ordinary tags and non-group tags, and that the team is used to employ the term “replicants” for both situations.
But from the perspective of the user, it’s not the same thing, and describing it as if it is the same thing makes it very confusing.
Ordinary tags are simply applied to items, and there’s nothing in DEVONthink indicating that replicants are created when we apply ordinary tags. This only happens with group tags, because they are akin to folders, and therefore, the term “replicants” makes sense.
Therefore, it would be very beneficial if the term stopped being applied to ordinary tags.