I think it might be really helpful if possible to have a right click option on each document to hide it from global search results.
The obvious use case for this is to hide archived materials in all their forms from global search.
However there are many others also - For example I use red, orange, yellow to denote urgency globally but I have some very large projects which have their own internal colour system and which I would like not to show up on my general urgency search - I have noticed similar stories from a few people on the forum.
Do you think global search in a folder can be a workaround for this (itās not implemented yet, Iām just talking about the idea).
Marking the document as hidden adds some hidden information, and search is so critical. What if some day you forget you hid some document and panic that you canāt find it? Thatās pretty bad and in my opinion not worth it if there are other alternatives to solve this problem.
Mmm, I see your point. āSearch folderā could potentially replace it but there are issues I see with this. Mainly, this search we are talking about would need to be accessible by a keyboard shortcut just like global search is now. Iām not sure this would be possible because you might have folders within folders, so if you had a āsearch current folderā shortcut (e.g. Shift and enter) then how would dynalist know which level of folder you were trying to search?
This means for this feature we wouldnāt be able to click a tag then press ctrl and enter like now, we would have to open up the file manager, presumably right click on the correct folder and run a search, which is far more clumsy / slow. Perhaps if you could set a keyboard shortcut for each folder in the folder options, but this seems tricky too ā¦
Personally I donāt see the hidden folder thing as a major issue. The document is still there in your file manager. Also you could add a statement at the bottom of any global search that āThere is hidden content pertaining to this search, click here to see itā, or something like that? Alternately you could make the fact that the document is hidden quite salient in the file manager itself by e.g. making it red
No, itās more like a special syntax for global search. For example: -folder:[folder-unique-name] search term.
I see your point. They do both have pros and cons.
One point that I think itās important when discussing this is to know that some users will not read what we write or understand what the red icons mean. Even now many people donāt understand that the blue icon means itās shared. Worst part is that when something is missing and canāt find, writing in to complain is the best case. In many other cases they just leave Dynalist and writing it off as an app that loses data.
Not saying this will definitely happen but itās a factor when considering changing any existing behavior. Maybe thereās a better way that meets both needsā¦
Ahhh yes, a search term which excludes specific folders would work perfectly fine for me at least as I can always turn this into a keyboard shortcut with a macro program.
Actually even that can be done - after clicking the tag the cursor is in the search box so the macro can just spit out the correct text to exclude the āhiddenā folders and press enter (I could even repurpose ctrl and enter). However this does make me realise that this might be more tricky for people who donāt use macros - but no more so than other searches I suppose ā¦
The standard for excluding a document, folder, tag, or anything else from a search is generally through exclusion in the search:
coffee -notebook:recipes
The only time an exclusion setting is used is with something like Indexed Search in Windows, for example.
If a search with an exclusion in the term is very popular, then you can bookmark the search, make it a hyperlink in a āsearchesā notebook, etc., just like you would in Evernote or so.
Note that one big problem is that folders and documents do not have a unique name (aka slug) right now, so it might be hard to say which ones you want to exclude.
The only unique id of a folder of document is that 24-character-long id, which is definitely not going to be used in the search syntax.
Yeah, the most straight-forward way seems to be letting you set a unique name for the folders youāre interested in excluding. If you donāt want to exclude it, you donāt have to set a unique name for it.
Not sure if thatād work wellā¦ Maybe thereās a better way.
Wouldnāt make logical sense but on the parent level.
In any file system you canāt have 2 identically named parent folders ā but within each of those 2 parent folders you can have folders/documents with the same name because theyāre not living in the same namespace.
So folder1/coffee and folder2/coffee should be able to exist ā which means we would be back to square 1.
My 2 cents is that this is how it works everywhere. If you do a search in Windows and you exclude something, it too doesnāt bother:
Yes. It would work with full-text search too but this is to illustrate the principle that, in general, search in file systems would work precisely how it would in Dynalist:
items can have identical names
including or excluding a name will in/exclude that item in search
