Request: Revamped Search Placement and Implementation on UI

Features
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The core idea behind this feature request is to make searching through notebooks and notes more intuitive and natural flowing with the current ui. It’s also meant to allow for expansion of its current functionality.

  1. Move Search to a drop-down above Notebooks section in Sidebar. This would allow search to be hidden and shown on the fly and would make sense with the rest of the information in the Sidebar. Users will be likely to search through their Notebooks, Notes, and Tags, and it would clean up the current Toolbar a bit.

  2. The sidebar would then display only relevant matches until the user clears out the search parameters.

  3. Expand upon this with advanced search features later on, such as Find and Replace, limited Search History, and even possibly allow for marking specific notes for editing during the current session.

I believe that these changes would improve the user experience and could help new users organically learn how to use such a useful feature. Thanks for reading.

1 Like
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Not sure about moving the search bar as it’s quite standard to have it where it is now. Filtering to only display the relevant notebooks in the side bar has been proposed before and would indeed make sense.

Search and replace seems quite complex a bit dangerous if you make a mistake. So there would have to be an intermediate screen to show what’s actually going to be changed and allow the user to confirm or cancel.

1 Like
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I completely agree with this part. It's also a standard part of most, if not all text apps. It's a feature i wouldn't want to touch anytime soon and would rather let someone with much more experience handle. That's where having a debug profile that is completely separate from normal usage that doesn't remotely touch any of the normal notes / notebooks would be very welcome.

Where the search bar is is pretty standard, yes, but why is it the standard, and how much would changing that aspect of the UI design make Joplin stand out? I stand by my statement that it doesn't flow with the rest of the design and doesn't make sense if highlighting of notes or notebooks or any other similar implementation that makes the user experience better occurs.

If all else fails, this could possibly be a great way of handling search on mobile devices since they have limited screen space.