85

So glad that you're looking into this, I love Joplin but search is probably the only thing I dislike.

  1. When looking for a particular note, what is your search process step by step? Can you describe where you click and how you go about it?
    Most often I search for a passage in a note, so I press ctrl-p to do a global search, hope I can make out which note it might be, ctrl-f and search for the part I'm looking for.

  2. Can you describe your experience when searching for a note?
    Doing both is pretty cumbersome, I'd love if global search would show more of the context and also show me each time a word is in a note as a single entry so I could directly go to it so I don't have to search in the note again.

  3. Do you have any remarks about the search feature?
    I never use the search bar above the notes I just remembered that this exists but it also makes searching a two-step-process (first search for the note, then for the part in the note).

Looking forward to better search a lot, searching is so important and it's a pain, atm.

86

This looks awesome! Is there a way to install this from file somehow?

Edit: It's already in the official plugin repo, nice! Thanks so much!

1 Like
87

I agree. VS-Code Style Search Plugin looks extremely promising. I hope that the author will soon continue to develop it further. @acemarke - just go on :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
88

With Joplin on Android, I can only search within a single note if I edit the note. That's cumbersome, and ideally we'd be able to search while in read mode. I'm on Android 10 (latest my phone supports), Joplin version 2.12.3.

89

FYI I've created a new thread to discuss my "VS Code Style Search" plugin over here:

90

It's indeed great that there's an attention to this function.

  1. When looking for a particular note, what is your search process step by step? Can you describe where you click and how you go about it?
    Honestly, after some years of using Joplin I've just discovered CMD+P (global search) from this thread :man_facepalming: Of course, this says something about me, but imho it also says something about how easy it is to find it...
    Considering that, when previously I was looking for a note, first I conducted a visual search of the notebook where I think the note might be, and then looked inside it.
    There's a search bar right on top of the note list, which confusingly searches across all the notes (and not only within the current notebook), but doesn't show from which notebook the matching note is, nor does it show any context unless you click inside.
    Previously I was thinking that this is the only search that Joplin has, and almost completely given up on it based on how it works.

  2. Can you describe your experience when searching for a note?
    Torturous. With global search it's a bit better, but it still feels counter-intuitive: you have to know that it exists, and you still don't get a lot of context in the results (and if you click inside the rest of your results are gone and so you have to start over). Then you have to use modifiers to constrain your search, but you still cannot find a matching notebook title first and then search within it (or perform a similar workflow).

  3. Do you have any remarks about the search feature?
    In a perfect world, what I'd like to see is:

  • the obvious search bar where you could just click and start typing (or use a hotkey instead to get the focus there, like CMD+L that we've used to in browsers)
  • search results that show you the notebook (and path to it when you have hierarchy) and then the note, and then enough of the context(s) where the search phrase was found
  • if you're in a note, then it first shows the results from this note, then from its notebook, and so on up the hierarchy of notebooks
  • it should be easy to constrain the search space (e.g., to a particular notebook), maybe just with a click
  • search that is semantic
  • the search results are shown in a separate sidebar that you can work with for a while

Basically, something that's intuitive - one shouldn't have to RTFM to find a "secret" hotkey to just search for a word (and its variations) - you expect this to just be there and work out of the box. One also shouldn't have to use modifiers to constrain your search in a basic way. Modifiers are great when your search space is so vast and your query is so unspecific that you have to narrow it down iteratively, exclude certain parts etc.

P.S.: I liked a lot what the gentleman above created, so it could be used as a starter.

1 Like