Small changes can greatly improve the search experience

Features
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.