A powerup is a special kind of tag you can add to a Rem to give it new behavior. Most kinds of formatting and special behaviors that can be attached to individual Rem are implemented as power-ups – for instance, background color/highlighting, todos, and Extra Card Detail.

Because powerups work a bit differently than normal tags, you won’t find them in the ## tag search (instead, apply them from the /-menu, more on which in a moment), and you won’t always see a tag in the editor when one is applied. Only powerups that don’t otherwise cause visible changes to a Rem in the editor show a tag. For instance, todos don’t have a tag because a large checkbox appears on the left side of the Rem, making it obvious that it’s a todo. But Extra Card Detail only does anything noticeable when you’re studying flashcards, not when you’re in the editor, so a tag with a powerup icon is displayed in the right margin when you’ve applied this powerup to a card.

You can find most powerups on the /-menu – many of them in the Power-Ups section. (A few internal powerups that you wouldn’t have any good reason to attach to a Rem yourself are left off of the /-menu.) For example, use /red to highlight a Rem in red, or /ecd to make a Rem appear as Extra Card Detail.

If a Rem already has a powerup and you want to remove it, you can do so in several ways, depending on the type of powerup:

Since powerups are tags, you can find Rem with that powerup by searching for an appropriate tag. For instance, to find all todo items in a particular document in a search portal, you can search for Rem in that document with Any Connection To Todo:

For many powerups, applying the powerup to a Rem also adds one or more special hidden data fields called slots to that Rem. For instance, selecting any highlight color actually applies a single Highlight power-up, with different values of a Color slot, and the Todo power-up has Unfinished and Finished slot values, set to indicate whether the todo has been marked complete or not.

(Note: The slots associated with powerups work similarly internally to slots in templates, but look totally different in the editor.)

Just like you can search for Rem tagged with a particular powerup, you can search for Rem with a particular value in some slot. To extend the example above, suppose you want to see only all to-do Rem in a document that are still unfinished. To do this, we’ll search for Rem with Any Connection To Unfinished (a slot value associated with the Todo power-up):

Especially for powerups that don’t show a tag in the editor, the name of a powerup or slot value you want to search for may not be obvious. The Filters section of Ctrl+F search shows both all tags used in the current documents, including powerups, and all slot values used on that tag, so aside from being a useful way to filter your documents in its own right, this is the easiest way to find the correct powerup or slot name to search for.

Similarly, you can create a search portal that finds Rem with Any Connection To the Unfinished slot value (you’ll be able to find this in the standard reference search when creating search queries, even though it is hidden from normal searches):