How to find notes again in overall flat structure?

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1

Hi All
I have been using Obsidian for some months now, and have a question in regards to finding notes again.

I have setup my Vault in a Zettlekast sense, meaning I wanted to avoid the classical folder structure that we probably all know.

In that sense I created an overall structure
00 - Quick Notes (Everything is scratched down here)
01 - Projects (Notes for specific projects that are not completed)
02 - Archive (Completed notes)
03 - Resources (All resources that support a note goes here)
04 - Templates
05 - Tags (Contain two notes that display used tags)
99 - Backlinks (… Not sure what to call this, it contains for example the explanation of what a Reward is, overall very generalised notes).

All my notes contain tags in a footer such as
T_Security, T_Network, C_Cooking, C_Book

And I can view my unique tags using dataview (plugin).

TABLE WITHOUT ID length(rows) as "Tag count", join(rows.unique, ", ") as "Unique tags"
WHERE file.etags
FLATTEN file.etags as tag
GROUP BY tag
WHERE contains(tag, "#T_")
WHERE !contains(tag, "#T_ex")
FLATTEN rows.tag[0] as unique
GROUP BY true

Or I can use a query and search for a specific tag, but is this really the best way?

How do you find specific notes again as your vault grows to 100’s or 1.000’s of notes?

Please note, as much as possible I avoid community plugins.

Thank you in advance
Best regards

2

I have a minimal but growing amount of folders that divide up my vault. If I have some larger, completely different area, I may be tempted to offload it to a separate vault (especially if it entails large tables that are difficult to index).

In the meantime, I’ve taken to create Area Dashboards, where there is a button to create notes for that area or space and a dataview(js) table that lists formerly added notes belonging to that space or area (depending how one wants to call it).

I brought up the term ‘space’ because in the publicly available demo vault, SoRobby calls it spaces:

There are already more than a half dozen example spaces leveraging Buttons and Dataview plugins.
Mind you, Buttons is now superseded by the Meta Bind plugin’s button functionality. So you may need to create your own buttons, if you need them.

If the DataviewJs table has many dozens of results, in Reading Mode (my forced viewing mode for my sub-dashboards), you can search your page content again.

  • Force Note View Mode is another external plugin - it can help dashboard files to be in Reading Mode always. I assume this plugin will not break anytime soon. You can use it safely.

Mind you, in the demo vault, the files are queried per folder, but if you insist on a flat structure, you can query by tags and have the same dashboard pages, where you can further peruse your files with CTRL+F.

And of course, you can use the Search core plugin.
With regex, you can query for ranges, such as: /start.*?end/, which will find…

  • Starting today, I’m beginning to see the end.
  • It’s a good start, but we’re still far from the end, buddy.
  • etc.

You can exchange start and end with your search terms, and look more deeply into what regex can offer.

3

“Sort search results by relevance” is on the Roadmap, so I think we can expect better native search in the future.

But I am using “Another Quick Switcher” which supports Ripgrep for fast fuzzy searching. I also sometimes using Neovim to search my vault with fzf and rg. (2 other fuzzy search tools.)

Another thing I do is heavily limiting my use of tags, so that the tags I do use are more useful. For example, I actively manage a #WIP tag for notes I need to be paying active attention to.

(That’s not a complete answer. But those are a couple things I do.)

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4

Thank you for your replies to my question

5

Omnisearch might be a good plugin for you if you’re looking for something specific.

If you’re note sure and just want to go exploring use the Graph View or hit a Random Note Button.

MOC’s can help you flush out new to old and vice versa

Example:

Days Alive

TABLE WITHOUT ID
 file.link as "List from Vault",
 (date(today) - file.cday).day as "Days alive"

FROM "" 

SORT file.cday DESC

LIMIT 90

Or you could explore searching FROM a [[Topic]] OR #Tag

You could search with a Query Block as you suggested

```query
tag:#focus
`` `

To find notes, you kind of need to know what you’re looking for. If you’re not sure and are just trying to discover an old note that could give you some inspiration then just keep hitting random note until something inspires you.

I would imagine if you’re wanting to flush out something in particular you would have it tagged with links and keywords which could be used in Omni Search.

Identify you Goal then set your Focus. if you’re not sure what your looking for or what you want to focus on then setup a couple of Active Workspaces and jump between interests until you find what you’re looking for.

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