I thought about Smart Folders, and I thought about the tag list idea I had, and I thought about a few other ways to make tags easier to use and navigate, but in the end I disliked all the ideas I’d come up with as far because of what they would do to the interface. I really wanted it to be an option to have the interface clean and sparse like 1.x if the user wanted it and all of the other ways just seemed to get in the way.

Well, then I recalled a browser I’d seen for tags in some other program, and I’ve honestly forgotten which, and realized that I could hack it up in about an hour of messing around (since I’d never used NSBrowser before). It turns out that this is, by far, the easiest way to browse through a ton of tags, and I’m rather satisfied with it. Behold, the Tag Browser for 2.0:

All tags are in the first column. When you pick a tag, it looks for notes that have that tag and then lists the other tags that those notes have in the second column, excluding the selected tag. Repeating this as you go down, you can drill through the tags and all the while watch the list view as it shows you what matches all of the currently selected tags in all columns.

You turn it on with ⌘⇧B and hide it the same way. It even features, as does the note header, a nifty little NSViewAnimation slide and fade as it comes in and out of view. It does not rotate with the view and adds columns as the window expands so you can go deeper if you need to. There is currently no way to make it taller, but I think depth is the concern here so I don’t think that much of a problem.

Thoughts?