Desktop: Search/Highlight text within note

[k-antonius]

Is there a way we could add support to search or highlight text within a note? Right now searching will come up with a note that contains the text, but there is no cue within the GUI showing where the text is located.

[mobitar]

Ok reading this now I understand you may have meant just standard Chrome-style search, which the desktop app does not have. This is reasonable - will need to find ways to add it.

[k-antonius]

Yes that's what I meant. Specifically, I was thinking that when the editing window has focus searching for a substring of the text appearing in the editor would be highlighted.

[aaronraimist]

See: https://electronjs.org/docs/api/web-contents#contentsfindinpagetext-options
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40987229/ddg#40987432
or
https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/486/how-to-enable-the-search-menu-to-quickly-find-a-word-or-phrase-in-the-application-in-electron-framework

[mobitar]

This has already been added in the latest desktop version. Press enter after searching in desktop to trigger highlighting.

[aaronraimist]

Oh well I'd still like it to at least scroll to the highlights and have a CTRL-F like bar to go from highlight to highlight

[regulator-g]

I would also like to press crtl+f, type a search and hit next to see each time the search is mentioned in a note

[mobitar]

Hopefully we'll get around to building this :) A little bit tricky because of the external editors. Would probably be a plain editor only feature.

[leafcutterant]

Would probably be a plain editor only feature.

How difficult do you think it would be to make it work with external editors as well? Could it work with at least the markdown-type editors?

Sorry for pushing for features, but this would be crucial for using my notes and it's one of the very few things that keeps me from migrating to SN.

[mobitar]

The Minimal Markdown Editor now actually has this feature. You can press Ctrl/Cmd + F to search within the note. Works really well.

[leafcutterant]

This issue thread is about two related but distinct features, and I think that causes the misunderstanding.

1. In-note highlighting. All instances of an arbitrary string become highlighted in a note. This is somewhat useful to have when searching for something, but it's not search per se. Indeed, as you said, Minimal Markdown Editor has this.

2. In-note search (also called Chrome-style search). All instances of an arbitrary string become highlighted in a note (so nr. 1 is a pre-requisite), the user can jump from instance to instance, and the selected instance is highlighted in distinct color.

Just think up a general use case -- nr. 2 is needed to make highlighting truly worthy to have. Unless the whole note in question fits onto the screen, the user will be left scrolling, seeking for the highlights visually. This is not only inconvenient, but also straining. And, in either case, the search position will not be indicated by the application, so the user needs to expend mental resources to either carefully (not) scroll, or to memorize their position in the note.

My need for nr. 2 is even greater because the in Folders extension I can't collapse items into their parents, so I'm biased towards creating fewer but longer notes.

[mobitar]

So the only difference between the two is navigating between highlight results? You can press Cmd/Ctrl + G in Minimal Markdown to go to next search result.

[leafcutterant]

So the only difference between the two is navigating between highlight results?

Well, essentially. It would make it more effective it you could also see how many hits are there and where you are in the navigation (e.g. a semi-persistent horizontal bar with the input field, two navigation buttons and displaying something like "M of N matches").

You can press Cmd/Ctrl + G in Minimal Markdown to go to next search result.

This is good to know, thank you! There was no indication that this feature was there, just as with the Cmd/Ctrl + F search. Is there also a way to go the the previous result?

[mobitar]

I believe it uses all the standard keyboard shortcuts:

https://codemirror.net/demo/search.html

[mobitar]

(I don't think the persistent search option works though. Was unable to get it to do so.)

[leafcutterant]

These are useful to know, thank you.

Tested it all on Windows, apart from the "Jump to line" shortcut they all worked.

Some interesting bits about the functions available, right below the shortcuts on that page:

Searching is enabled by including addon/search/search.js and addon/search/searchcursor.js. Jump to line - including addon/search/jump-to-line.js.
For good-looking input dialogs, you also want to include addon/dialog/dialog.js and addon/dialog/dialog.css.

[mobitar]

Ah, yeah, the jump to line might make sense in the Code Editor, since that one displays line numbers.