Search and Selection suggestions

Features
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Hi, I'm a big Joplin fan and posted some observations and suggestions about it's use of searching and selecting on the Github page but it went stale and was closed, so perhaps this forum might be a better way of sharing ideas. I think Joplin would benefit from more intuitive search/selection behaviours which would follow expectations for computer/mobile app standards, and also allow smoother/faster everyday use.

**Search / Selection Issues

  1. When searching via the search text entry box, and the Goto Anything search, the behaviours differ and using them is unintuitive as a result. In the Goto Anything, if you search for a word and select one of the results in the dropdown, the corresponding note is opened, the note highlighted in the search results pane and the notebook/subnotebook is opened and highlited in the notebook pane. This behaviour is expected. However, when searching from the search text entry box, selecting a result does not open/highlight the corresponding notebook/subnotebook. This would be confusing to those who have many similar notes and making it like the Goto Anything behaviour would allow a quick visual check as to the location of the selected note.
  2. When searching via the search text entry box, the searched text in the editor panes is only highlighted when in the split view mode, not when in wysywig only mode. I imagine many like myself do not use the split mode, so lose this functionality.

Search / Selection Suggestions

  • Show notebooks in the search results pane. It would be very useful to type the first few letters of a notebook to quickly navigate to it. It may be buried in subnotebooks for example. Clicking on the search result could open the corresponding notebook/subnotebook in the notebook pane and select the first note if necessary.
  • The Go To Anything search is powerful, but I did not know about it until I read a post here. Perhaps an icon button to open it would increase usability.
  • Search highlight colours are: red in the search results pane, orange in the markup pane and orange in the wysiwyg pane. Can these be standardised to a single colour and preferably a more used highlight colour for contrast (i.e. FFFF00)
  • When searching for a particular string in a long note, you have to search twice. Once in the search text box, then you have to press CTRL+F and retype in the string to search within the note. A suggestion, similar to other note apps would be to jump to the first instance of the string in a note when it is clicked on in the search results pane. The find and replace dialogue could be automatically opened with the field already filled with the search text, so the user just has to press find to search for the next instance.
  • When searching via the search text entry box, results are listed in realtime only when the full word matches. Otherwise you need to keep typing * after typed text to see results. Can this requirement be removed, so as you type, results are updated in real time. Again, many users are probably not aware how to / the need to use wildcards.
  • The selected note in the notes / search results pane is light grey, while the selected notebook is dark grey. When rolling over notes in the notes / search results pane, notes are highlighted in light blue, when doing the same in the notebook pane, it is a medium grey. Could this be standardised so the behaviours are the same, that colours are similar across both panes, and the colours are more contrasting (i.e. can be hard to detect the three various grey colours on the notebook pane)
7 Likes
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Hi,

Thanks for your post. As a side note, something I realized recently...

For my part, it seems to me that the search tool is a bit verbose. If for example you want to search for notes with several "tags" you have to type tag:tag1 tag:tag2 whereas you could imagine typing tag:tag1,tag2 like in many applications.

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When searching for a particular string in a long note, you have to search twice. Once in the search text box, then you have to press CTRL+F and retype in the string to search within the note. A suggestion, similar to other note apps would be to jump to the first instance of the string in a note when it is clicked on in the search results pane. The find and replace dialogue could be automatically opened with the field already filled with the search text, so the user just has to press find to search for the next instance.

Very much support this feature request, searching twice is very annoying!

3 Likes
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What do you think about the behavior that each time you enter a search term in the search, the term vanishes after about 0,3 second and the search is carried out. This yields to the fact, that advanced search syntax can't be used at all (at least you're are not the speedy gonzales of typing) and just refactoring a search term combination becomes cumbersome.
Is there a way to change the behaviour to search on pressing Enter only? Isn't this an expected behavior for search engines anyway?

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I also found that this behaviour indeed would be very usefull.

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Select multiple search results for tagging
Instead of hierarchical tags I use hierarchical notebooks and manually add secondary tags. That lets me search by parent or child. With (notebook:) and (any:1) without (tag:) hierarchy.

To make this work well I need the ability to add a tag to batch tag notes from a search result (select all/none checkboxes). That lets me search a child notebook: -tag:ToBeAdded then batch tag. Having the search show the notebook of each result would make untagging easy too. Its not drag and drop tagging but it has more fine control. It might be an alternative to the tag.all performance bottleneck. To make this hierarchical, search notebook: would need to also search subnotebooks

Also the search button is not working (but F6 is).

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