Please make it return. For me search is almost useless if I can’t find it within a particular note. It’s like needing to search for a word in a document but you’re only allowed to search on your computer for the document the word is located in. This is a really basic feature and I don’t understand why it’s gone.
We completely changed search in Agenda. Results are now presented in a popover, instead of inline in your notes. This has a bunch of advantages:
It is much, much faster
It doesn’t disturb what you are working on unless you explicitly choose a result
It integrates with Spotlight, and as a result, will also integrate with upcoming AI from Apple
These changes meant search was completely different to how it was implemented before. The old way of moving through a long list of files, with the highlights, was replaced with the new way.
The new system does not work with specific locations in notes. It just says “this note has the word”. So we lost a little functionality in the process, and rather than delay the whole release, we decided to postpone that particular feature (…since most notes in Agenda tend to be quite short anyway).
The good news is that we haven’t forgotten about it, and will be working to add highlighting of words back on the matching note, so you can more easily see where the match occurs.
I have the same question. It’s nice that it shows what document the word appears in but it doesn’t highlight to word. If it’s a long document jumping to the word you’re searching for would be very helpful.
Indeed. Agenda has become pretty much useless to me now as a result of this basic functionality disappearing. “It’s something that will return in a future update” just doesn’t cut it. Scrivener all the way for me now, I’m afraid.
When doing a shortcut in iOS and testing for case when a note is not found, I was surprised that it gave me a note from trash/bin and there seems to be no way to exclude trash/bin from search.
I guess that is probably a bug. We definitely try to avoid the trash when searching in the app. We probably missed it when searching via a shortcut. Thanks for reporting it.
I created a new shortcut to test and only uses Agenda in the phone and it doesn’t seems to have the trash/bin issue. Very strange. Since I was using the desktop and mobile version to trash notes earlier, maybe there was some kind of sync/cache issue.
I often have to search for words in notes that are in different projects. The note titles do not help much. It’s the context around these words that helps.
The way I do this now on the Mac is to search for the word, click on the “Create Overview” button while holding the Option key. This creates a temporary overview in a new window.
Is there a quicker way to invoke this? For example, I would imagine a key combination like CMD+Shift+F to search for something and display the main results in the main window, or at least create a temporary overview.
How do I achieve this (temporary overview) on the iPhone?
Edit: apart from this friction, I really appreciate the revamped search!
I’m trying to understand what particular problem you need to solve. If I understand correctly, the titles from the search results are not so useful immediately, and you want something more like the old search where all the notes were present.
My question is: why can’t you just click or arrow through the list, visiting each note in turn? That way you should be able to see if the notes are what you want. Note also that an arrow appears when you start to navigate, allowing you to go back to where you came from.
Did you see the new 19.1 release? It allows you to move through the hits inside notes, by tapping continuously, or hitting return. You can also use CMD-G to do it, and that will automatically jump between notes when it gets to the end of one note.
Hopefully one of these things helps. If not, let us know what you are missing, and what we might be able to do to help which isn’t solvable with what we already have.
Thank you for asking! It is not easy for me to describe, but I think you understood it.
The easy part first. My second question was: how do I do this on an iPhone?
The rest of my question
Correct. The shown information is clean, but too little.
Yes, like what you achieve with a “Temporary Overview” (same timestamp as linked above).
But, while I am at it. I am giving it an attempt.
Either the popover itself (or the results window) could, instead of showing the note titles (or the full notes in the results window), just show the line(s) that contains my matched text, surrounded by a bit of context. This would allow me to go in full confidence with the results. Or maybe give me the option to decide how much information to be shown (title/meta information, context around results, or full notes)
I created five notes, each with one paragraph from a Lorem Ipsum generator. In two of them, I inserted the word “needle” to be searched.
Apple notes handles this well, in my opinion. You write your search string in the top-right corner. The results are shown in the list of notes, but only a few lines are shown.
If I get it right. I can arrow through the list here:
Each time I hit Enter, I see the content of the note and the word is highlighted in the note. (continued below)
Yes, it works. But this is IMHO not a great UX compared to a simpler tool like Apple Notes.
In Agenda: I have to hit DOWN, ENTER, inspect the note, decide if it is the one. Now, do this 50 times.
In Apple Notes: I have a dozen (if not more) snippets of notes with highlighted results already. I may be lucky that what I am looking for is already there. Worst case, I scroll a little, see the next dozen ones.
The difference is in the information provided at a glance: wide with Apple Notes, too narrow with Agenda.
Please note, I am grateful to have the engine behind the new search feature. It is so powerful! It is how the results are presented that could be improved. But perhaps this is just me.
I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. We have optimized for finding notes that match. If we were to show every paragraph that had a hit, the list would be much longer and more difficult to navigate. That’s why we use a two phase approach: find note, then find place in note.
There’s no right or wrong answer. It largely depends on how you like to search, and your note setup. Eg. I always give my notes a title I can identify them by, so for me there is rarely an issue. If you are using dates, it is more difficult.
Note that on Mac you can just keep hitting CMD-G to go through the results, which is equivalent to going through the list in Apple Notes (ie the result order will be the same). That doesn’t work on iPhone. It’s more clumsy there. You have to keep opening the search panel, and tapping the note to move to the next.
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll see what we can do with it going forward.
