Searching Notes

Notes are only useful if you can find them quickly. Inkdrop's full-text search also supports filtering notebooks and tags with search qualifiers.

Local & Global Search Scope

Inkdrop provides two search scopes:

• Local: It filters the items of the note list
• Global: It searches all notes across notebooks

When you are viewing a certain notebook, tag, or status, the search scope is automatically set to local. In this mode, you can see the search bar on top of the note list has "Filter" placeholder with funnel icon.

When you are viewing "All Notes", the search scope is set to global. In this mode, the search bar has "Search" placeholder with magnifier icon.

Shortcut Keys

You can move focus to the search bar by pressing Cmd+Shift+F on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows and Linux (Command: core:find). To switch search scope from local to global, press the same shortcut key again while having focus on the search bar, or press Cmd+Shift+Alt+F on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F on Windows and Linux (Command: core:find-global).

Pressing Esc key to clear out the search keyword.

Filter Notes with Special Qualifiers

You can specify qualifiers to filter notes with notebook, status and tag like so:

book:Blog
book:"First Notebook"
tag:JavaScript
tag:WIP
status:active
status:onHold
status:completed
status:dropped

For example, to find notes which contain a keyword "Hello" and a tag "Issue":

Hello tag:Issue

Also, you can filter notes by title or body:

title:"JavaScript setTimeout"
body:keyword

Search with a phrase

By enclosing keywords in double quotes ("), you can search notes by a phrase including spaces. Example:

"foo bar"

Excluding modifier

To search notes NOT matched with specified keyword and condition, add - modifier before the keyword and the qualifier like following:

-book:Blog
-tag:JavaScript
-status:completed
-foo
-"foo bar"

Note that you can't specify excluding modifiers only without including conditions.

Caveats

The Inkdrop's full-text search does not support partial keyword matching while prefix matching works. That is, you can't find notes with "string" when you search for "trin".

That's because it uses the SQLite's full-text search engine which uses a token-based indexing algorithm like Google web search. It gives you a great performance and an ability to sort by rank, by tokenizing text into words and rank them based on TF-IDF:

• https://sqlite.org/fts5.html

That's why you can't search notes like grep.

Can you help us improve these docs?

The source of these docs is here on GitHub. If you see a way these docs can be improved, please fork us!