Filtering Everywhere!

MOD-EDIT: 2/21/2021 Check what has been implemented.

Would be powerful if all major Obsidian modules had filtering capability.

Filter in Edit and Preview windows

Be able to show/hide heading sections, or show/hide sections that contain particular #tags or even by styles (ex. show me only code blocks or quotes in this huge, never-ending page)

Filter the Backlinks Sidebar

The way Roam does this is great.

Search Bar [DONE]

Advanced booleans, of course.

Search Bar Results

ex. Too many results? Filter with more booleans!

File Explorer

Just show me folders with recent edits. Or show me folders that contain notes with a particular #Tag like #ActiveProject

Graph View [DONE]

These two posts already mention filtering for Graph View.

Indicator

Naturally, we would need a clear visual indicator that filters are active in any particular view so we don’t freak out and think we deleted a bunch of essential information :wink:

All of this will become so valuable as our personal databases become huge.

128 Likes

I think some kind of more advanced filtering would be so fantastic. In particular, I have been seriously missing the ability to filter by tags (including by more than one tag) as a means to narrow down the file list, and also to search within my tags (which tag do I use for this thing? I know it had this one word in it…). Booleans also sound like a great idea.

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Yes! Filtering is definitely needed. Being able to filter Backlinks, and search results at a minimum would be a huge step forward.

6 Likes

I’m surprised that nobody has expressed interest or similar requests for page content filtering.

Page filtering has the potential to make Obsidian the markdown version of Jupyter Notebook. We can develop and ellaborately document code in one wiki style page. Once Obsidian filtering is in place and has an API to match, a plugin can take care of syncing only the code styled content in the page to your preferred compiler.

This possibility is wildly exciting to me. I hope others see similar potential and enough interest is drummed up to convince the developers to make it happen.

19 Likes

Boolean filtering on tags would be nice.

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I decided to move from roam to obsidian. But yes, filtering is definitely an issue.

8 Likes

Really missing this feature having coming from Roam. Filtering by multiple tags is essential for my implementation of Zettelkasten, which involves looking for connections with potentially hundreds of previous notes.

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Related post:

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Everything need to be filter.

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This is the most crucial missing feature in my opinion. Even though asking for “filter everywhere” is a bit unrealistic, any addition to the current filter possibilities would be a great step forward.

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Boolean AND OR NOT
For combining search of #tags and also notes with combinations of internal links, for instance [[cat]] AND [[dog]]
Will be a very functional feature for navigation.

1 Like

Agreed - this is an essential feature, in as many place as possible.

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I have been using todoist for 8 months now and I have recently discovered how useful is the Filtering section as it gives you the situational power, the ability to find the content that you need → it saves you a lot of time.
In my opinion a new page for filters on the sidebar is crucial

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I would like to see filtering everywhere too! Particularly filtering backlinks.

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Simply link in a closely related request just came in.

Option that shows all the highlights in a page

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+1 for filtering in the backlinks pane.

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Simply link in another closely related request just came in. Made by @robertsmith .

Magic, "One Click," Dynalist search results—Yes!

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Yes, filtering and sorting of backlinks would be great. I’d like to use obsidian for task management, but without filtering and sorting of backlinks, this is difficult. In particular, it would be useful to be able to sort backlinks by date.

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I was about to post a request for filtering in the explorer and remembered this great topic. Just wanted to double down my support for this.

When I picture the explorer being filtered, I imagine some cases where keeping folders around would be nice and others where flattening might be best. Tagged folders may provide an opportunity to get a hybrid of both.

Thanks.

1 Like

file search / filtering is one thing, but what is more useful is content retrieval dynamically based on the query inline - how roam works.

5 Likes