Expander: Search and include list of notes

It looks really interesting :slight_smile:

Isn’t it on the community plugin directory yet ?

Its on the community plugin directory:
image

Does your plugin support any boolean functions in the query? I’m trying this but it doesn’t return any results. If I remove AND “Conan the Barbarian (1970)” it works fine.

```expander
	tag:#comic/issue AND "Conan the Barbarian (1970)"
```

@Spidrax It uses the Obsidian Search functionality for this.

So all those functionality available:
https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Search

1 Like

0.9.0 Update

  • Auto expand the feature. Automatically expands all queries on the page when opening a file
  • Ability to include a current note in search results (I suggest increase delay, because search functionality can use cache and will duplicate results)
  • $match template sequence which returns a matched text (helpful when use regexp)
  • $match:header template sequence which returns a link to the closest header which have the matched text
  • $header now return links and not the content of headings
  • Add sequence list in settings
3 Likes

Yes, I have installed it today and I love it! Please don’t leave it :blush:

This plugin is exactly what I am looking for to build my Obsidian recipe “database” . I might need some help constructing the right way of searching for things (in the future), but that is mainly because I am relatively new to Obsidian itself.

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Does $match support several matches, or only one?

I’d like to extract - via regex - several dataview properties with Expander

(why? because I want the “hard-coded” content, real links that update, not the preview-only dataview)

Wonderful plugin! Can I make a feature request? :grin:

I just created a few expander searches and then realized afterward that they were all out of order. Well, they are probably sorted by creation time or update time, but what would be amazing would be to have the option of sorting by daily note tags.

Example:

  • I have several journal entries/blog posts/whatever that all contain links like [[2021-09-21]] on the first line. Can Expander detect those and sort the results accordingly?

… after writing this I’m realizing that this is probably a feature request for Obsidian search, not for Expander.

I actually can’t remember the reason why I did that. I can return it as an extension for the $heading sequence.

I think the idea was about using transclusion to reduce text duplication.

I had an idea of the separate plugin which gets the content of all transclusion and return one markdown file.

There is even a prototype called copy to markdown but there is no functionality what you need, currently.

It makes sense, thanks. I would glad to return that functionality. It’s all about the time. I hope I’ll find some to improve the plugin.

Please also keep heading transclusion functionality :smiley:

1 Like

Hi there,

this looks like it might solve a problem I have trying to search for and return blocks, but I can’t get the syntax to work. let’s say I have a paragraph such as this:

really exciting and interesting quote that is also too long to show up in it’s entirety in the search results. #interesting

I have a search query

line: (> #interesting)

which finds two entries in the search sidebar, one for the quote marker ‘>’ and one for the tag. What I would like is to display the entire quote, and only if it has the quote marker AND a particular tag (or combination of tags).

What would be even better is if I could nest the tags (and keywords etc) underneath the quote, so that I can display/transclude the quote only without the tags.

But first things first, how do I get to see the quote in the search result instead of just the tag? I’ve tried:

line: (> #interesting)
$match

but that didn’t work…where am I going wrong?

You could try

line:(>) AND tag:(interesting) 

(works also without AND)

thanks! So that works to get me the file link, but not he actual block with the quote.

if I do:

line:(>) AND tag:(interesting) 
$match

I get this:

.
.
.
.
#interesting

a few rows of empty quotes and the last line with the tag. Expected behaviour would be to show the quote…

Ah, I see. I checked only the normal search function, have no experiences with Expander. Sorry.

Hey, everyone who uses TextExpander. I didn’t work on it for a while because of… you know… life :slight_smile:

I would like to improve expander to make it more flexible and easy to use. But we’ll see how it’ll goes in the future.

I’m not satisfied with the current state of the plugin. So I’ll try to find some time in next months.

Also, I would like to rename it if you have more appropriate name for it. Expander is a little bit misleading (because of text-expander plugin and software which do text expansion much different).

3 Likes

I thought two alternatives: embed-query-results and extract-query-results. In order to preserve the “expander” name somehow, expand-query-results could be suitable.

Thank you for all the work. I use this plugin in my daily routine, to keep the list of my drafts updated.

1 Like

Possible names:

“Expanda” (obvious mascot potential) - names don’t have to explain the plugin

“Edit Mode Query” (its main greatness is the fact that the query runs in Edit Mode unlike dataview)

btw, the plugin stopped working for me. I hadn’t used Obsidian in a while so I’m not sure what changed. Just get a blank line for my queries now. Going to play with disabling other plugins to see if some update messed up this plugin. On latest.

This is a consequence of Obsian updating to CM6. Several plugins are broken. You can check “Use legacy editor” in Editor options to use it…

You can create a GitHub issue in this plugin repository to alert the developer and hope they have time and want to fix it.

1 Like