[Toadling]

Originally Posted by elektroglide

what i'd most like in the area of hidden data is the ability to search right across the database, not just in the item which is selected.

Couldn't you just select the "Library" collection in the sidebar? Or not select anything at all? Then the search function covers the entire database by default.

Or do you mean you want it to include items not present in the current view (e.g. "on hold" and completed items)? If that's the case, you'd need to first switch to the All Items perspective (Perspectives -> All Items). I have it mapped to Control-Shift-A for quick access.

Personally, I prefer searching only on the selected sidebar node. I almost always know what folder an item is in, so the search is quicker with fewer results to wade through.

Some time back, there was discussion of adding a switch of some kind to toggle between searching the current sidebar selection and the entire database, kind of like the little popup menu in iCal's toolbar search field or the search bar that appears when you do a search in Apple Mail. NetNewsWire, if you're familiar with it, is another good example of an app with this kind of option.

I'm not sure what became of the idea. Presumably it's still planned for a future OmniFocus release.

Originally Posted by bashosfrog

My vexation is that Search is tied to the toolbar. To try and minimise the visual clutter of OmniFocus, I've set my toolbar to text-only mode. Invoking Search automatically sets the toolbar to icon mode, and there's no way of automatically returning it to text mode. I have to do it manually.

I'd much prefer to see a Search term entry window independent of the toolbar.

But isn't this standard Mac OS X behavior provided by Apple?

Instead of using the toolbar search (a.k.a. "Outline Search" accessed with Command-Option-F), you could make sure your cursor focus is on the main outline and then invoke the inline Find window (Command-F) and search that way. Does that help? This will, of course, only search across items visible in the current view.

Originally Posted by bashosfrog

Plus the ability to also search archives along with the current database with one search term.

I agree this would be handy. Or at least index the Archive with Spotlight in addition to the main database, so any OmniFocus item could be found with Spotlight queries and saved searches (Smart Folders) in the Finder.

It'd also be nice if projects and actions in the Archive had either a different file type/kind or some kind of metadata indicating that they're archived so they could then be differentiated in Spotlight searches. For example, give me all archived actions completed prior to a certain date or something like that.

-Dennis