Search and frontmatter filters

The sidebar search box finds files by name, by content, by frontmatter field, and by file kind.

How to reach it

Type in the search field at the top of the sidebar. This is desktop-only; the cloud workspace has its own search.

Cloud note search

In the Cloud workspace, the sidebar and Cmd+K search titles, descriptions and note text through the server while online. The sidebar's Include version history switch also searches saved versions. The folder tree continues to show title matches.

Without a connection, or when the search server is unavailable, cloud search uses cached titles and descriptions only. It does not search note text offline. Result snippets show the description, and an Offline search: titles and descriptions only label explains the reduced coverage. Only notes already cached on this device can appear. Offline history search covers cached version descriptions and their note titles, not version text.

Cloud kind filters are @shared, @html and @yaml. Online searches accept at most 16 distinct search terms; a longer query shows an inline message asking you to shorten it.

Filters

Click the filter icon at the right of the search box to pick a kind filter, or type its prefix directly:

A filter narrows every other kind of match: combine it with free text (@yaml settings) or a frontmatter token (@yaml status:draft) and only files satisfying all of them are returned. Typing just a filter, with nothing else, lists every file of that kind across your tracked folders. @shared updates live — sharing or stopping a share while it is the active filter updates the list without retyping.

Name and content matches

A file whose name exactly matches your query, with or without its extension, comes first. Desktop name, relative-path and folder-name searches match every word in any order, including across - and _ separators; contiguous name matches rank before separate-word matches.

One free-text character matches word starts in file and folder names; from two characters, names and relative paths also match substrings. File contents are searched only when the free-text part has 3 or more characters; shorter text shows a quiet hint below the name results. Frontmatter and @kind filters still work at any length.

Content matches any word in the free-text query. For ai bootcamp, a file containing bootcamp appears; a file containing only ai does not. At least one matched query word must have three or more characters. Shorter words still contribute to score and phrase matching; a query made only of shorter words has no content results. Content results put the contiguous phrase first, then files containing more distinct query words, then files in alphabetical path order. Repeating a query word does not increase its score. Content uses the first 16 distinct query words; additional words are ignored for content. One-character words match the start of the body or a position after whitespace or punctuation; longer words match substrings, ignoring case and retaining diacritics. A phrase ranks first only when its first word and every one-character word inside it start a word. A single-word search also treats ſ as s and final sigma ς as σ; searches with several words use lowercase comparison. The snippet shows the first matched word and highlights all matching words visible in it. Desktop content search does not correct misspellings with fuzzy matching: it reads files on each query, unlike the cloud's prebuilt search index.

As you type, files whose name matches stay in the tree. Files that only match somewhere in their content appear separately, in a collapsed Matches in content group — expand it to see them. Every result row shows where the file lives, directly under its name: the folder and subfolder for a file in a tracked folder, the folder path for a file opened on its own. Search lists only files that exist on disk; a file that has gone missing stays in the recent files list, marked as missing, while no search is typed. Content search reads tracked files from disk for each query. Files longer than about one million characters (fewer when the text has many emoji) match only by name; HTML source is not content-searched.

Frontmatter filters

Type a key:value token to filter by a frontmatter field instead of free text:

Filter tokens are case- and whitespace-exact, and multiple tokens are ANDed together. You can mix filter tokens with plain text in the same search. Typing key: autocompletes the field names and known values seen across your files. A filter for a field no file has still shows as a chip, but struck through, so you can see it matched nothing.

Opening a result

A sidebar search pre-fills the in-document find bar. Opening a result jumps to and highlights the first match.

Limits

• Frontmatter key:value filters work in the desktop Local view. Cloud search does not support these filters.
• Files longer than about one million characters are searchable by name only, not by content.