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Quick Question on searching with tags


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So a quick question from someone who just recently decided to create a paperless ecosystem being 'tag centric' as opposed to the traditional notebook hierarchy that's kept me warm and fuzzy for so many lonely nights!...

 

I've structured my tagging system into hierarchical groups to help me visualize different properties of the note (document type, current project, ...)  So to use the famous car example that so many like to illustrate, is there a way to do the following search:

 

Click on the tags to view my lovely organizational representation of the tags in all of their glory.  Select the 'car' tag, and command click to also select the 'invoices' tag. ->  Then hit enter to execute the search

 

What comes up is a list of the 20 invoices I have so far.  What I'd like to do is from these 20 results, search for a keyword.  (Essentially creating a search that would otherwise be accomplished by "tag:car tag:invoices keyword").  The ability for me to visually select the tags from the tag list is an important feature for me - I just can't figure out how to search for any additional information once the results are shown.

 

Thanks so much in advance, and I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season!

 

Cheers!

 

Aaron

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I just can't figure out how to search for any additional information once the results are shown.

 

Once your results are shown, you would simply continue to include more key words in the search bar:

 

Tag:car    Tag:invoices     Keyword1     Keyword2    Keyword3 (or "key phrase")...

 

If you want to search within notes on desktop, you would use Ctrl + F, just like you would on a web page, PDF, etc. Mobile devices have a "search note" feature.

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So I don't think i did the best job of explaining....

 

If I start out (using the desktop client for mac) by clicking on the tags icon, which then displays a full screen view of all of my tags.  I then click 1 tag, or many, and hit enter.  EN then executes the search and goes back to the notes screen where I am graced with a list of all of the notes that have the tag(s) I clicked.  

 

Here is where I'm lost...

 

What I'd like to do now, is type in the search box to further search these notes for specific keywords.  The problem is that as soon as I click in the search box for the keywords, it performs a system wide search (as opposed to searching just the notes that are in the list view with the tag(s) selected).  I know that I could include the "tag:car" text in the search bar, but that's essentially starting from scratch all over again.  I was looking for a way to be able to further weed out notes of the ones that were already propagated by the initial clicking of "car" & "invoice" tags from the tag screen.

 

Hope I did a bit better job explaining the scenario... it's much harder to explain on paper!  :)

 

Cheers!

Aaron

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  • Level 5*

This is WIndows? In order to continue the current search in the WIndows client by typing in the search bar, click on the magnifying glass in the search control and select "Search Current Context" The "Search All Notes" setting resets the search to all notes in this case. I never use the "Search All Notes" setting for this reason.

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Hi Aaron,

You are absolutely right when you describe selecting multiple tags in the full-screen tag menu... and subsequently not being able to search for keywords within the results from the search bar - because it defaults back to searching All Notes. That is definitely a bug! I've just tested it on Mac and Windows. Windows behaves as it should, but not Mac (at least not the latest release for me).

 

An alternative (for now) which works is the following:

 

At the top of your note list (start in "All Notes") you will see a tag icon next to the sorting options menu icon. Click on that and select/ type in a tag. You can then click on the tag a second time, which will then show you a shorter list of all other tags the resulting list of notes contains. Choose one of those tags... and keep filtering, depending on how many tags your target notes have. I have found that when I go to the search bar to filter for any keywords, it does what it should - it searches within the results of the combined tag contexts.

 

The interesting thing about searching multiple tags this way is that as you click on the tag icon at the top of the note list each time, the search gets whittled down to only show you further possibilities - so in other words, it is impossible to choose another tag that the resulting list does not have - and so you will never have zero results. I hope that makes sense. 

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Hey Frank - thanks for the suggestion!  Unfortunately, it still puts me in the same spot... even tho I've narrowed down my list to all of the notes with both 'car' and 'insurance', as soon as I then start typing in the search bar, back to an 'all notes' type search I go...

 

Happy (sort of) at least to hear it's a bug.  Considering EN's preference of Tags, for me at least, it really helps to have all of the tags visually represented in groups (as opposed to an alphabetical list) and move from one category of tag to another.  The fact that on the full tag view, it only 'lights up' the remaining available tags to select once the first tag is selected is great - as soon as I would start to type: "tag:car" command, my brain starts to melt and I completely forget about what other tags I'm trying to look for.

 

So it appears both your way, and my way of selecting multiple tags (without specifically typing the tags in the search box) both result in the grouping of notes associated with those tags, but allow no further searching of the note list shown.  Hopefully it's something that'll get sorted.

 

Now if only we can get them to allow for a nested tag view in iOS...   :)

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