Requesting new search & bookmark functions

🌟Features
#1

I was playing around with my bookmarks and was finding some issues with the way the search function works vs. how I expect it to work, and while typing them up was also brainstorming for other additional functions I would like to see incorporated into document search:

  1. Add search functions for items within a calendar week, so items dated within the current date’s week. A month search would also be nice.

  2. Within search should probably be inclusive. When searching for items within the next 7 days, I intuitively expect anything tagged with the current date to be included as well.

  3. When in the search results window, a way to go a specific item would be nice, maybe via a right-click menu. This is present in an all-document search but in a single-document search there doesn’t seem to be a way to see an item’s context without zooming in on the item and then clearing the search bar.

  4. A way to edit an existing bookmark. I sometimes want to edit the search terms for my bookmarks but have to make a new bookmark and delete the old one.

  5. A way to specify the start and end date of a date search. Within, Since, and Until are all relative to the current day. I would like to be able to search for things in a particular month or year regardless of the current date, and would need to be able to specify both the start and the end of the date range to be searched.

  6. Embedding a bookmark inside of a list. For instance if I have an item and it’s children should be everything with a specific tag, it would be great the item could essentially be a bookmark for the search for all other items with that tag.

  7. Search by parent/child. For instance I have a list that sorts my meeting notes by day, month, and year. But if I wanted to search for a specific term only within April I would have to tag each line with #April for the search to constrain as I’d like. Instead I would like to search by parent:April, which would only show items that have a parent (or grandparent) of April.

    Pasted image827Ă—703 23.9 KB

I’m sure there are workarounds for at least a few of these, but nevertheless I would like to get the dev’s feedback on these requests.

2 Likes
Search "edited" with specific dates not the range syntax
Ability to place saved bookmarks containing Search specs into a document
Link to bookmarked search
#2

You mean in addition to “within:1w” as a shortcut? Or do you mean before end of this week, which could be within the next 2 or 5 days depend on which day it is?

Good point. I think right now the time defaults to 0:00 am, so normally it’s already past that time.

We’re thinking of clearing the search automatically when you zoom in or out. Does that solve your problem>[quote=“ladyWildfire, post:1, topic:734”]
A way to edit an existing bookmark. I sometimes want to edit the search terms for my bookmarks but have to make a new bookmark and delete the old one.
[/quote]

This should be easy to do, but the existing way is not that bad; at least it’s possible. I think it’s one of those things that we’d love to do if we had infinite time, but in reality a lot more things are more important. Thanks for suggesting though! We’ll see when we have time to do this.[quote=“ladyWildfire, post:1, topic:734”]
A way to specify the start and end date of a date search. Within, Since, and Until are all relative to the current day. I would like to be able to search for things in a particular month or year regardless of the current date, and would need to be able to specify both the start and the end of the date range to be searched.
[/quote]

We planned to do this but just realized it’s not tracked anywhere. Here you go: https://trello.com/c/3Ws0UZFJ/164-search-for-absolute-date-ranges[quote=“ladyWildfire, post:1, topic:734”]
Embedding a bookmark inside of a list. For instance if I have an item and it’s children should be everything with a specific tag, it would be great the item could essentially be a bookmark for the search for all other items with that tag.
[/quote]

I’m afraid I still don’t quite understand. Mind giving an example?[quote=“ladyWildfire, post:1, topic:734”]
Search by parent/child. For instance I have a list that sorts my meeting notes by day, month, and year. But if I wanted to search for a specific term only within April I would have to tag each line with #April for the search to constrain as I’d like. Instead I would like to search by parent:April, which would only show items that have a parent (or grandparent) of April.
[/quote]

You can zoom into “April”, search for that “#2017”, and bookmark that search, right?

#3

I think that @ladyWildfire wants to tag parent and make children automatically inherits this tag. Which I’m waiting eagerly for too, as it’s so useful. Example:

  • Some important stuff below #important
  • A
  • B
  • C

Currently when you’re searching for #important it will show only parent, and it could be so useful to show parent with all tree below it. Yes, you can tag all children but it looks like a mess and it’s easy to forget. Or maybe there is already some hidden feature for achieving it? Yesterday, after using DL for many months, I learned that I can put “-” to exclude things :smiley:

EDIT: Or maybe same modifier like “+expanded” added in search bar would work. Query “#important +expanded” can show all children under parent with this tag. I’m talking especially about searching in all documents, because in search within one document it is little bit more flexible, I can at least manually expand tagged items.

2 Likes
#4

Ah, I see.

Yes, I agree with the “+expanded” way. Making all children automatically inherit tags is implicit and can result in unexpected experiences.

Search is definitely due for an overhaul to allow more advanced options soon!

1 Like
#5

+1 I would like +expanded as well

#6

Would it be technically possible to search for some value (tag or other string) but only when this item or one of its parents has date within some range? Let’s say today is 2017-05-13 and I have (simplified) tree like that:

+Journal
++Saturday !(2017-05-13)
+++Important stuff #important
++++ Item 1
+++++ Item 1a
++++ Item 2
+++Other stuff
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2
++Monday !(2017-05-08)
+++Important stuff #important
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2
+++Other stuff
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2
++Sunday !(2017-05-07)
+++Important stuff #important
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2
+++Other stuff
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2

I would like to search for items tagged #important (and see their children with +expanded) but only in current week (so for monday to today I need to write since:-5d), which in my imagination should look like “#important +expanded AND parent:since:-5d” and should give me that result:

+Journal
++Saturday !(2017-05-13)
+++Important stuff #important
++++ Item 1
+++++ Item 1a
++++ Item 2
++Monday !(2017-05-08)
+++Important stuff #important
++++ Item 1
++++ Item 2

it could be also useful to search for items only within different items, e.g.: “#important +expanded AND parent:#SomeProject”

To be useful it should in both cases search for parents all the way up to the top of the document until it find first occurrence, so “#important AND parent:Project B” with this tree:

+Projects
++Project A
+++todos
++++item #important
++Project B
+++todos
++++item #important

should look like that:

+Projects
++Project B
+++todos
++++item #important

#7

To answer your questions:

You mean in addition to “within:1w” as a shortcut? Or do you mean before end of this week, which could be within the next 2 or 5 days depend on which day it is?

Before the end of the week. I would like to be able to search for things that are due in a particular calendar week, it helps me keep track of my weekly tasks at work.

We’re thinking of clearing the search automatically when you zoom in or out. Does that solve your problem?

Yes I think clearing the search bar would help this.

A way to edit an existing bookmark. I sometimes want to edit the search terms for my bookmarks but have to make a new bookmark and delete the old one.

This should be easy to do, but the existing way is not that bad; at least it’s possible. I think it’s one of those things that we’d love to do if we had infinite time, but in reality a lot more things are more important. Thanks for suggesting though! We’ll see when we have time to do this.

I agree it’s pretty low-priority since you can just create a new one and delete the old one. Keep it on the back-burner and come back to it when there’s more time?

Embedding a bookmark inside of a list. For instance if I have an item and it’s children should be everything with a specific tag, it would be great the item could essentially be a bookmark for the search for all other items with that tag.

I’m afraid I still don’t quite understand. Mind giving an example?

Sure. I organize my work lists with the calendar year and quarter it’s in. Let’s say I want a list to summarize which projects are in which quarter, and I want it to be self-updating. This is different than a bookmark because I am essentially looking at multiple bookmarks in a single list. The list would look like:

  • CY17Q2
  • item 1 with tag #CY17Q2
  • item 2 with tag #CY17Q2
  • …
  • item n with tag #CY17Q2
  • Cy17Q3
  • item 1 with tag #CY17Q3
  • item 2 with tag #CY17Q3
  • …
  • item n with tag #CY17Q3
#8

This is exactly what I was intending with my request. I would like to be able to search by parent item in exactly this way. I use Dynalist for projects at work and I would like to be able to look for things marked #To-Do with parent:PROJECTNAME rather than individually tagging each line with #PROJECTNAME.

1 Like
#9

And item 1 through item n are from elsewhere, is that correct? (Sorry for the late reply)

#10

Yes those items would be populated in a similar way as when you use the search bar. Maybe using this list function would only show the specific item with that tag, but using the search function would show that item with its parents and/or children as it currently does.

#11

That’s pretty advanced and I’m sorry to say we’re not close to that yet. We’d first need to build “views”, which can make global search results editable. Then we need to make views embeddable. The road ahead is still long :slight_frown:

1 Like
#12

Adding in my vote for the +expanded request. Usually I’m searching something where the parent item is tagged, and the children are a bunch of notes related to that tag. Yes, I can go through and manually expand-all for each of the returned parents, but it’s very tedious when there are many items. I can’t just select-all expand-all on my search results, because that would also expand all the parents of the parents!

This would be useful for items other than tags too - I do a lot of categorization by color as well, but I’d rather not have to color every single child line. It would be great to have the +expanded option be universal to any search type.

4 Likes
#13

I’d like to vote for some mechanism to filter by parents as well.

I had the idea today to add the #hide tag to node sections I don’t want to print, and then exclude them via -#hide. Unfortunately it didn’t work because all the children of the #hide node still appear in the search. I would love it if I could have a search term that means “apply to children too”, so for example maybe searching for -#hide+ means “exclude all nodes that have the #hide tag, as well as all their children.”

Thanks for your hard work on Dynalist. It’s a great tool, and it’s getting better every week!

1 Like