Tagpad lets you add – and follow – hashtags in your own notes.

By adding a hashtag to a line in your document, you can continue with whatever you are writing and later search the document to find the tag.  This way of working may be suitable if you have a plaintext document containing lots of #thoughts, #ideas and #todos.  Just tag your lines as you write them and Tagpad will prevent these key parts from being buried in your stream of work.

New tags are defined by simply typing them.  If you want to invent the tag #christmas, then just go ahead and type it. The autocompleter will suggest it the next time you start typing something that looks like #christm….

One you’ve decorated your document with hashtags to denote the subject of particular sections, the next step is then finding those sections (so you can start doing your #todos, fixing your #bugs or turning your #ideas into #features).

To find all occurrences of a particular hashtag, choose ‘New Tracker’ from the ‘Track’ menu.  Enter the hashtag you wish to find and hit enter.  The occurrences are listed within the tracker window.  If you wish to narrow the search, add another hashtag separated by space, e.g. “#todo #important”.  You can add as many hashtags as you wish, e.g. “#todo #james #important”, and in any order.

You can use the up/down arrow keys to navigate through the results.  You can open another tracker by again choosing ‘New Tracker’ from the ‘Track’ menu.  You can close trackers by using the grey ‘x’ button in the top-left corner of the Tracker window.  You can ‘undock’ the trackers and rearrange the layout of your screen to suit your needs.  To dock the tracker in another part of the window, drag the tracker over the window and wait…; after half a second the window will show a docking zone, where the tracker can be dropped.  If you drop one tracker on top of another tracker, they will appear as one, with a tab bar across the top to facilitate switching between them.  The trick here is waiting just half a second before dropping the tracker window, to get an idea of where its going to end up.

Of course you can open, save and create new documents.  Please note that only plaintext documents are supported at this time.