Advanced Search

The Advanced Search option will bring up a new window, in which you may enter the text you wish to search for, and then select from a number of common fields to indicate which of these fields should be included in the search. You will also have an option to perform a case-sensitive search, or to perform a case-insensitive one.

The default search options are to search (if present) the Title, AKA, Link, Tags, Author (aka Creator) and Body fields, and to ignore case (e.g., a search for ‘amazon’ will match ‘Amazon’).

You may also vary the scope of the search.

• The default is to search all Notes in the Collection.
• If your Collection has a Seq field, then you can also elect to search within the scope of the currently selected Note: in other words, the selected Note and all other Notes for which the selected Note is a parent.
• You can also search forward, meaning within the currently selected Note and all following Notes in the Collection (based on the current sort sequence).

Hit the OK button to initiate the Search and select the first Note in the Collection matching the search criteria.

Ordinary Search

A simpler option is to use the Search command to place your cursor in the Search field at the top of the frontmost Collection window, then type the text you wish to search for, and press Enter to start the search.

When using this simpler option, prefixing the search text with a hash mark (‘#’) will cause Notenik to look only in the Tags field for the search string.

Search Results Navigation

No matter how you initiated the Search, you can use the Search Next command to look for the next matching Note in the Collection following the last one found.

After using Search Next one or more times, you may use Search Previous to back up to a previously displayed search result.

Persistent Options

Note that, after using the Advanced Search Option, the options selected will persist until changed, or until the end of the Notenik session, even if you later initiate a search using the simpler method of specifying a new text string in the Search field at the top of the window.

If you select one of the limited scope options (before or following), and then perform a search, and then modify the search term, the search for the new term will be performed with the previously selected scope, but using the currently selected Note. So, for example, if you had previously selected within, and then searched (moving the current note selection), and then changed the search term, you would no longer be searching the same set of candidate notes.

Each visible occurrence of the search text will be highlighted on the Display tab, for each matching Note.

Tagging Search Results

There is also an option beneath the Nav menu to Tag Search Results. This command can assign the user-specified tag to all Notes matching the search criteria. Of course, after assigning such a tag, the list of Notes containing that tag can be easily referenced on the Tags tab.

Search & Filter

There is a Nav -> Search and Filter command that will filter the Notes shown on the List, Tags and Outline tabs to include only the Notes that match the Search Term.

This command can be used initially, to position the cursor within the search field, or later, after the search term has been supplied. The filtering will occur in either case.

A Filter Results option is also available as part of an Advanced Search, and this is another way to request filtering of the search results.

After executing such a Search & Filter command, the user has a couple of options available for returning to the full set of Notes in the Collection. The first option is to use the Collection -> Filter > Show All command. The second option is to simply clear the contents of the Search control in the Toolbar.

Note that a filtered search uses some of the same logic as is used for filtering based on the contents of a Mark field, with the result that these two types of filtering cannot be combined.

Note also that filtered search results will prevent found Notes from successfully linking to other Notes that might be in the full Collection, but not part of the found set.