
I don't actually use those parent tags for tagging notes, they are just there to help me group other tags, so that I can find them easily. I organised my tags by using parent-tags (normal tags can be nested within other tags by simply dragging and dropping). I can easily have a look at them all (across notebooks) using the tag, but I can also look at those notes linked to programming (both Evernote and non-Evernote related) by just checking the relevant notebook. Evernote!) in lots of different notebooks (Blogs, PhD Advice, Programming). I actually see some advantages of tags now too - for example I can have a bunch of notes on a program (e.g. I wasn't convinced by tags at the beginning, but using a notebook-only approach wouldn't work due to Evernote's rather simple nesting capabilities (notebooks can only go one level deep).
