Search is the must powerful feature of this plugin.
You can open a Search modal (Tree Search: Search) to find and open notes, headers, links and tagged lines that are nested under it.
This makes retrieval of atoms of information (notes, tasks, tags, headers, and web links) very fast and contextual.
Shortcuts and Navigation
- Up, Down → Up and down arrows move the selection
- Enter → Open the selected file
- Shift + Enter → Highlight the source of a relation
Hierarchical Search
For large vault, efficient information retrieval typically needs a lot of structure. This is one of the main points that this plugin tries to address. It easy for to humans to narrow patterns of retrieval. Instead of “what is the name of that documentation generator library” it is much faster to ask yourself “maybe documentation under software development ?” and then narrow down further.
A somewhat synthetic example from this example vault:
Mind the dot (search separator)
This syntax (terms split by the search separator ”.”) tells the search engine that it should find all graph nodes that contain root that have a directed path towards nodes that contain doc
The hierarchy can be built organically. No need to rush or refactor your entire vault. You simply by adding some outline to existing notes and relations or using the parent frontmatter property to hint towards a parent.
Search Operators
Besides separator (.) that is the most important search operator, there are a few useful search modifiers:
:task - matches any task node in the tree
:emoji - matches any node that contains an emoji
:page - matches pages only
:headers - matches headers only
Search Operators and Examples
| Expression | Definition |
|---|---|
value | contains(value) |
"page" | equals(page) |
"page | startsWith(page) |
-value | not(contains(value)) |
-value test | and(not(contains(value)), contains(test)) |
value test | and(contains(value), contains(test)) |
| value | test | or(contains(value), contains(test)) |
value :task | and(contains(value), modifier(:task)) |
value :emoji | and(contains(value), modifier(:emoji)) |
value :page | and(contains(value), modifier(:page)) |
value :header | and(contains(value), modifier(:header)) |
:header :page | and(modifier(:header), modifier(:page)) |
Smart Search
The intent is for this search to be much faster than the other search methods in Obsidian. This plugin achieves speed by
- pre-indexing most of the graph at refresh time and edit time
- optimistically searching and dynamically adjusting number of results (most of the perceived search speed comes from optimizing the rendering, not the search itself)
- no fuzzy-matching capabilities
- no casing support (lowercase same as CamelCase - this is a feature as the intent is to think less about the information was structured, what casing was used, etc)