I use special characters in my tags to denote the “data type” in my tags. This is a practice I carried over from Nirvana.
I have three kinds of tags.
Tags that start with @ sign to denote Contacts
Tags that start with # sign to denote Topics
Tags that does not have any special characters to denote Contexts
For example:
Task: “Find a hotel to stay in San Francisco”
Tags: Home @Sarah#Travel
So, when I focus on what I can do at Home, this task would show up. When I am talking to Sarah, and wants a reminder about what I need to talk to her about, I focus on @Sarah tagged items. When I am planning my trip, I can focus on #Travel tag, etc.
The problem right now is that all tags in GTDNext is automatically prepended with # tag in the display, such that the tags look like #Home #@Sarah ##Travel
why not just change your notations to something other than those symbols? You can use “1” for Contacts; “2” for Topics; and nothing for Contexts. That way they would look like this:
#Home #1_Sarah #2_Travel
I know this may be odd compared to what you’re used too, but after a week it should be intuitive.
I think the best is to have nothing at all added by the app in front. We can add that ourselves. I invent and redefine and adjust my tag set continually and typically give them some prefix such as E:Lo and E:Hi for Energy Low vs High etc. or L:Home etc for different locations. And I have also used special characters like period, colon etc to get them sorted into natural groups. I see no point in having anything at all added in front by the app.
Come to think of it… What I really wish to have is the ability to embed the tags right into the task captions/comments, e.g.
“Reply to Folke’s comment about GTDNext by Monday”
Suppose I have pre-defined tags: “hntopper”, “Folke”, “James Titus”, “GTDNext”, “Nirvana”
Then the app can detect the presence of “Folke” and “GTDNext” in my task caption at the time of entry and automatically apply these tags, can’t it? It would be nice if it could also figure out what Monday means and apply a due date… but may I am asking too much.
Embedding the tags in the subject line is something we are interesting in doing as well. By adding a “#” before a tag it would automatically add it as a tag. Using a “#” or something like it would really make it much easier to recognize as a tag rather than having to look at each and every word.