6.1 Tag inheritance

Tags make use of the hierarchical structure of outline trees. If a heading has a certain tag, all subheadings will inherit the tag as well. For example, in the list

     * Meeting with the French group      :work:
     ** Summary by Frank                  :boss:notes:
     *** TODO Prepare slides for him      :action:

the final heading will have the tags ‘:work:’, ‘:boss:’, ‘:notes:’, and ‘:action:’ even though the final heading is not explicitly marked with those tags. You can also set tags that all entries in a file should inherit just as if these tags were defined in a hypothetical level zero that surrounds the entire file. Use a line like this¹:

     #+FILETAGS: :Peter:Boss:Secret:

To limit tag inheritance to specific tags, or to turn it off entirely, use the variables org-use-tag-inheritance and org-tags-exclude-from-inheritance.

When a headline matches during a tags search while tag inheritance is turned on, all the sublevels in the same tree will (for a simple match form) match as well². The list of matches may then become very long. If you only want to see the first tags match in a subtree, configure the variable org-tags-match-list-sublevels (not recommended).