I’m curious if there’s a way to search for an exact phrase.
Alas, not yet, we hope to make this possible in a future update.
Is there any update on the search functionality? I’m seeing lots of old posts saying this is something high up in priority but nothing about timelines or updates being released. Search is probably one of the most lacking features and it’s extremely important to be able to find everything in an app that’s meant to collect lots of notes
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We agree that it’s one of the most pressing areas, and we do aim to improve it significantly this year, but first have to get some other things out of the way first.
Is it possible to limit my search to a particular string and no more? My issue right now is that I’m trying to find notes that contain “pH”, but the results are useless because there are hundreds of them full of “phone”, “Phil”, etc, etc.
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Not at the moment, we hope to offer more options the future.
Is there any update on the timeline for search updates?
There’s a lot here, so I may have missed it, but I didn’t see this addressed directly: is it currently not possible to find things that don’t match a specific tag? From the other current limitations, I assume that’s the case.
That’s correct, much more powerful search, including binary operators like NOT, AND, OR is planned for a future update.
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Are there any new features for „unfinished actions“?
When the ability to search on unchecked checkboxes arrives, it would be absolutely brilliant to be able to exclude archived notes! (Mine are full of uncompleted actions as they were superseded by events etc)
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This is one reason I doubt the effectiveness of such filtering a bit. I actually rarely check off every single task in a note. Often a few things just end up unfinished.
But I’m sure there are people who make it a priority to explicitly check off everything, and for them, a summary mode with unchecked items would be very useful.
We would like to do a major search overhaul in future, and will add features at that point.
We did add some editing features a few months ago. On the Mac, you find them under Edit > Checklist. They include options for copying/cutting unfinished items. You can use that to move them to a new future note, for example.
I don’t make it a priority to check off everything but it would be helpful to me for review. Currently there’s no way to review notes and/or check items that are marked as “undone”. So I have to review “everything”. It’d make it much easier if I could do a search for the past month with all undone items and then handle those in some way (change check marks to lists, or strike through, or trash the note, etc…)
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Yep. For me at least, creating an overview of notes that have yet to be marked complete would be far more useful than checklist items.
Also searching for notes with incomplete reminders. An incomplete reminder is more meaningful than an incomplete checklist item.
Generally speaking I think it would be more useful to find notes that have certain characteristics, rather than individual lines within those notes.
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Could marking a Note as complete automatically mark all Check Boxes in the note as complete? Ideally with a dialog box “do you really want to…?”
Also, being able to search on Notes that are complete/uncomplete will be really helpful.
It occurs to me that notes can exist in several different states, in decending order of importance or current relevance:
- On the Agenda
- Uncompleted
- Completed
- Archived (ie within an archived project)
This potentially gives notes greater granularity, the meaning of which for me might be:
- On the Agenda < Needs attention today or very soon
- Uncompleted < Needs attention sometime
- Completed < No action required, but I may need to refer to this as part of my current work
- Archived (ie within an archived project) < reference
Being able to search on these states, and/or search results being groups by these states, could be really powerful.
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The new search we have planned should allow you to filter on the things mentioned (marked as done, has unchecked items, etc).
The “Marked as Done” one is indeed a bit of an outlier. It seems as if you would definitely want to be able to filter that, even in our current UI, but it was added after the initial launch, and we never got around to making it filterable, even though you can filter on “on the agenda” status. Clearly, this would be one of the filter options we would want to add.
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Thanks!
It would be really powerful to have ‘Uncompleted’ as a default overview just below ‘On the Agenda’. I can imagine using it to get an overview (literally!) of what Notes I need to deal with after I’ve completed those that are on the Agenda.
That ability would also prompt me to be more rigourous about marking Notes as complete.
I can’t imagine wanting an overview of Completed notes because they’ll never have outstanding actions - because they are completed!
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I am really looking forward to this!
I’ve just realised notes can have another ‘state’ that I’d love to be able to search by: pinned to top.
I’d love to be able to have an overview of all pinned to top notes. I use these pinned notes as a ‘home page’ or summary of many projects, with key information like major dates, next main task etc.
Maybe I missed it, but: Is it finally possible to search for unfinished checklist items without a due date? I wonder why this isn’t visible somewhere. When I work with meeting protocols ist common to have several action points.
How do I filter for unfinished checklist items? What’s the syntax for it? Or what’s they way you are dealing with it? How do I assure that checklist items won’t get lost?