TL; DR: Two ways to search for tasks without a tag:

1. “type: notag”;
2. “tag: ~”.

Today I was organizing my tasks in 2Do when I found out that I’ve got millions of tasks that are not tagged, so I decided to create a smart list that contains all of them, so that I can tag them in a bunch.

Then I realized that I don’t know how to filter them out. Based on my experience with 2Do’s search function and key word usage, I tried “notag” first. Nothing pops up. Well ok, no worries. How about “tags: none”? As we all know that “tags: xxx” is how you find all the tasks with tag xxx.

Still nothing. In a shoot-randomly-and-hope-for-the-best manner, I tried “!tags”and it turned out to be another fail. (of course!) Well, time out for me. A bit googling and I found it listed right there on the official site of 2Do: “notag — will show tasks without tags”. Wait what? This is exactly what I did at the first time! I must be missing something. Turns out, you have to use the key word “type” with notag, like this: “type: notag”. That’s tricky!

There’s another way to do this utilizing the key word “tags”: “tags: ~”. Personally I prefer this way since it aligns with the normal way of tag search as I mentioned above.

As always, a Chinese version.