[Mango Himself]

I perform searches in OF but I've never seen it work on notes. Meaning, if I search for the content of a note, will Search find it?

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by Mango Himself

I perform searches in OF but I've never seen it work on notes. Meaning, if I search for the content of a note, will Search find it?

Yes, it will find it. I just tested this and it works fine.

Note that "search" in Omnifocus is misnamed. It's actually filter. This kinda stinks.

But if something with the relevant text is in a note and already available in your view, then "searching" will filter the list down to items with that text in the note, just fine.

OF search is actually quite powerful, with support for regular expressions, but also, I suspect, counterintuitive (and a little clumsy) for many users because its scope is limited by the prevailing focus and filter settings. To search across the whole database you essentially have to begin by clearing the filters and focus, and selecting the library folder in the sidebar.

This is why I personally tend to use saveable searches like:

tasks where (<txt> is in name) or (<txt> is in note)

in Where in OF (for OF 1.8)

(The system will prompt you for the <txt> string)

The advantage of this for me is that it always searches across the whole database, regardless of settings, immediately shows a list of all matches, detects whether any current filters have to be cleared in order to look at anything that has been found, offers to do this automatically, and refocuses down on the relevant set of projects, selecting the matching tasks.

to search only in notes you could use:

tasks where <txt> is in note

and you can keep more complex variants in your search library, e.g.

tasks where (<txt> is in note) AND (<txt2> is in note)

or

tasks where (<txt> is in note) OR (<txt2> is in note)

(for these you would be prompted twice, for two different strings)

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