Symlink views

A view is a directory full of symlinks — one per matching file — generated from a query. Views make it easy to hand a tag-filtered selection to tools that don't know about tessera: media players, editors, import dialogs, etc.

Generating a view

# Default output: _.tags/ in the current directory
tessera view QUERY

# Custom output directory
tessera view QUERY -o /tmp/my-view

The symlinks use relative targets so the view directory is portable as long as it stays on the same filesystem.

A file at Music/Rock/song.flac becomes a symlink named Music__Rock__song.flac (path separators replaced with __). This keeps all links flat in the output directory while preserving the original path as the name.

Long filenames are truncated at 255 bytes while preserving the file extension.

Keeping views clean

tessera automatically removes broken symlinks (pointing to files that no longer exist) and empty subdirectories from the output directory before generating new links.

Example workflow

# Build a playlist view for all lossless rock tracks
tessera view "lossless and genre/rock" -o ~/playlists/rock-lossless

# Open the whole view in a media player
mpv ~/playlists/rock-lossless/

# Refresh after tagging more files
tessera view "lossless and genre/rock" -o ~/playlists/rock-lossless