If you use a query very often, you may find annoying to enter it every time. Tagsistant offers the alias/ directory as a bookmark store to save your favorite queries. The alias/ directory contains files holding a query each. For example you could save an alias named maiden_videos like iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/AVI/ and another one named summer_2000 like file:/format/eq/jpeg/time:/year/eq/2000/time:/month/eq/August/.

We should more properly talk of fragments of queries, because each alias can be combined with other aliases or extended by more tags when used inside a query. Let's see how.

If you list the content of the store/ directory, you'll see your aliases listed with regular tags but with an equal sign before them:

$ ls ~/myfiles/stores/
... =maiden_videos ... =summer_2000 ...

You can include your aliases in your regular queries:

$ ls ~/myfiles/store/=maiden_videos/@/

even combining them with regular tags:

$ ls ~/myfiles/store/=maiden_videos/time:/year/lt/1985/@/

The last one will be expanded before being processed as:

$ ls ~/myfiles/store/iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/AVI/time:/year/lt/1986/@/

(Long Beach Arena, we are coming!)

Ahem... Please use aliases with caution. They are actually replaced literally by their query fragment and this could hide some surprises, especially if the fragment contains the +/ operator. If the maiden_videos alias have contained:

iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/AVI/+/iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/MPEG

the query:

$ ls ~/myfiles/store/=maiden_videos/time:/year/lt/1986/@/

would have been translated into:

$ ls ~/myfiles/store/iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/AVI/+/iron_maiden/file:/format/eq/MPEG/time:/year/lt/1986/@/

The time:/year/lt/1986/ tag would have been added to the second part of the query only! The Iron Maiden AVI files would have been returned even if filmed after the year 1986 while MPEG files would have been limited to that year!