"Open File" vs "Find Item"

“File finder” for searching documents and bookmarks makes sense.

“Item finder” for searching just “items” (tags, etc.), but excluding documents from results would make sense.

“Item finder” for searching both items and documents doesn’t make sense for me. As the name states, it should search just for “items”.

As “item finder” is implemented, listing both items and documents, the “file finder” became a bit useless. In that case to have an all-in-one search makes sense (unification of file finder + item finder in a single tool).

I was trying to explain to a colleague who just started using Dynalist (coming from Workflowy) the three available searches (four searches including the global search - ctrl+enter). She got a bit confused, finding difficult to make sense of all these searches, and the overlap of “item finder” and “file finder” both searching documents didn’t help her sense making!

IMO, I don’t see problem on having all these searchers, since they create different levels of specialized searches. But a boundary should be set to “item finder”, in order documents aren’t listed there anymore, and since just items are listed, it would be even easier to select from the search result (I wouldn’t be concerned to differentiate if the result is a document or an item). This way I could explain to my colleague easier:

  • Use document search ‘ctrl+F’ to locate items in the opened document;
  • Use global search ‘ctrl+enter’ to expand the search for all Dynalist items;
  • Use item finder ‘ctrl+shift+O’ to perform a fast global search for Dynalist items (only)
  • Use file finder ‘ctrl+O’ to search for documents and bookmarks from the left panes