search function: searching for "#a" not "#abcd..."

Michael

question concerning the search function:
I have a tag "#o" that helps me to filter all my outlines. but the search result also list tags like #open, in general all the tags starting with #o...

is there a possibility to search only for "#o" and not for "#o..."?

thoresson

I’ve solved this with double hashes for that kind of tags. ##h for my “hub notes” (which is what I guess many of you are referring to as “structured notes”) and ##p for “production” (which is notes where I gather thoughts and links to other notes when I start working on a specific article and before I move the writing into my word processor).

Michael

good idea, thanks a lot!

ctietze

@Michael You could try a phrase search "#o " (note the space and the quotation marks!), but that won't match "#o" at the end of a line. You could replace all your #o's at line ends with sed 's/#o\\n/#o \\n/g' or similar, though.

galen

Another option is to just tag them with #outline or #ol. Do you have so many outline notes that tagging them with more than one letter is a big effort?

The Archive is an interesting case in software minimalism, where the limitations of the tool force you to adopt conventions that (1) work pretty much as well as if the tool had the feature you want, and (2) end up allowing your archive to function with many different tools. This prevents feature creep in The Archive and allows you to easily switch to another tool if necessary (for example, if you also access your archive on a non-Mac platform.

In this case, The Archive doesn't support a rich search syntax, but the functionality you're looking for can be had by using a different tagging convention.

This isn't to say that The Archive shouldn't support more sophisticated searching in the future, just that that feature isn't needed to get what you want here.