Searching Overhaul Ideas

I would love to have the option to search with more granularity in Joplin. For example:

  1. The ability to search with the ‘whole word’ modifier. It would help with not returning so many false positives when searching.
  2. Also, the ability to search with the ‘match case’ modifier would be great.
  3. The ability to search with regex would be amazing. Would really allow you to find exactly what you where looking for.
  4. Others may have said this before, but the ability to toggle between globally searching, searching through specific notebooks/notes would be extremely helpful.
  5. This would go hand in hand with #4: only show tags that are in the current notebook. Would also allow for more easy searching.
  6. Allow multiple tag searches. So you could click on a tag, hold Ctrl, and select another tag. Then only notes that have both tags would return as results.

I would be interested in possibly helping develop these searching ideas, just let me know if these ideas aren’t too ambitious, and where I would need to start.

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You’ve raised some interesting polnts. I believe improving the search capabilty is in the queue, but @laurent would know more about it.

There’s one feature request open on github to search within a note.

A good place to start is the BUILD documentation. If you have specific development questions, you can post them here in the Development category.

I also vouch for 4,5 and 6. This would make Joplin remarkably more powerful for working with deep hierarchies.
If a search within a notebook is implemented, it would be nice to show the results as:

  • immediate notebook
    • note 1
    • note 2
  • immediate notebook
    • note 3
    • note 4

it would be nice to also be able to toggle the showing of applied tags below a note’s or to-do’s title within a notebook.

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These searching features are the ones I miss most from Evernote. It would be great to have them in Joplin.

Search has changed a lot since then, so for new suggestions please open a new topic.