Small changes can greatly improve the search experience

Features
1

The "notebook" command can search in the specified notebook, but the command search is very troublesome. Sometimes you need to search in different notebooks many times to find the desired notes, and the search experience is very poor.

Suggestion:
When searching, please do not clear the search results when clicking the notebook. Just display the search results of this notebook.

A small change can simplify the search, quickly find the desired notes, and greatly improve the search experience

If you think this suggestion is good, please make your voice so as to attract the attention of developers and realize it. thank you

2 Likes
2

That's an interesting suggestion. Although, I'm not sure if I need/want it, it would nice to see if something similar is done in other projects.

I actually never seen a search that would not clear out the query if you click some navigation. I fear this behaviour might make some older folk stuck with the search query they forgot to erase. So, we might get a ton of questions like "why my notes are not showing up??? Are they gone???" while there's an innocent looking search query sitting in the search box.

But other than that, search usability is always nice. Would be cool to see where and in what context it's done well by others

3

Imagine that you can quickly view search results in different notebooks without having to use commands to search repeatedly in different notebooks. How convenient it is.

There are many ways to solve the problem you worry about, such as highlighting the search bar when searching

4

In more than one way I am puzzled too how search works in Joplin. Not that I cannot live with it, but ...
here a few examples:

  • click the search box on top of the notes list, type any text (e.g. "e", to guarantee results for this little test), and joplin takes you to notes with that search term, but it doesn't scroll down to the occurrence of the search term or highlight it. If your notes are long, you need a 2nd search inside that note to find it.
  • cmd-F in the menu bar means "search in all notes", cmf-F inside a note (where the cursor is) means "search in this note", which is listed as cmd-G in the menu bar, cmd-F in the notes list ... etc. etc. I would like to have separate commands which do always invoke the same action.
    It is hard to learn changing commands like this, in particular if your workflow is keyboard oriented and you don't like to switch between mouse / touchpad and keyboard all the time.
3 Likes
5

Then there is also the search you can pull up with ctrl-p. It is kind of like the "menu bar" search but it pops up the result and those results go away when you select a note to go to.

6

The small deviation to your idea could be the following feature:

drag'n'drop of notebooks (and tags appropriately) to the search bar, resulting in notebook:notebook-title search query

Pros:

  • This way, the feature doesn't break the usability pattern of "navigation does not affect search".
  • Basically, it gives more freedom for power users while not affecting new users who might struggle with search in general.

Cons:

  • the feature cannot support full syntax of search engine, like any:1, exclude -, title:/body:, etc
  • consequently, if dropping multiple notebooks/tags in search box, the resulting query might not make sense.
    So, the user has to know the basic workflow without drag'n'drop and able to correct it if something goes wrong.

Generally, I think, it won't be merged at the moment anyway as there's a need for massive refactoring looming over the notelist and sidebar. So, starting to support new features now probably makes little sense.

As for repeated search, I think search favorites are our best bet.