It's come up recently that some aliases are cluttering the autocomplete. And it made me realize this is more of a UI issue. All tags that have been aliased away should be considered clutter. I propose that "dead tags" be deprioritized so that they only appear at the bottom of the list after all the valid ones, so they only appear if there are few enough valid tags to leave room.

Aliases show up in autocomplete so if you start typing them, the alias target shows up. Usually, this is a good thing, making it easier to find the correct tag to use. Not showing up at all, or even at the bottom, would likely just lead to new unnecessary tags being created by spelling variations and such.

The issue is with tags that were aliased to a large tag and have a smaller tag as the prefix, which leads to irrelevant suggestions.

this has been brought up before, but I think that overall just deprioritizing aliases would be error. this is only a problem that exists when we're aliasing invalid hybridized tags to a valid adjacent tag, which is generally an uncommon situation. for all of the other times in which an alias is created you would want them to show up in searches.

as an example, all of the paring tags can be written in either order and are aliased to the proper tag. so, if aliases were deprioritized and a user typed in feral_on the only two <form>_on_<form> tags they'd get are feral_on_feral and feral_on_taur, everything else would be pushed off the end by all the other stuff

this would have to be a decision made on a tag-by-tag basis, marking individual aliases as unimportant so they don't show up on the list. but even then, I'm still unsure if this is a good idea since the user wouldn't see that a tag is aliased away.

I've noticed a workaround for when I don't want aliases suggested as autocomplete options: add a backtick after the tag prefix. For example, must autocompletes to mustang_(horse) -> horse, but must` autocompletes to mustelid.

This is probably an accidental implementation detail rather than intentional functionality, but it seems to work, and offers more control than turning off alias suggestions 100% of the time.