Remove strict word order requirement in Quick Switcher and Link Suggestions

Feature requests
#1

Use case or problem

When using the Quick Switcher and Link Suggestion popups, results only show when the word order is correct. For example, If I am searching for the note “Introduction to Blender.md”, typing “Blender intro” will not land a result. Entering “int ble” / “in b” / etc works great (thanks fuzzy search!), but often we don’t remember the particular order of words in the note title.

In the search pane, results are found as expected, regardless of search term order.

Proposed solution

Allow for non-strict word order in the Quick Switcher / Link Suggestion popups.

Current workaround (optional)

Move to the search pane to find notes that aren’t showing up in the popup’s search results.

5 Likes
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#2

In addition:

  • Items matching the order of search phrase could be ranked higher to show earlier in suggestions list.
  • Searching “phrase with strict order” should still be available e.g. by enclosing the phrase in quotation marks.
1 Like
#3

Yeah that would work nicely malecjan.

Licat actually replied to this in Discord:

“For now, it’s designed like that on purpose. Including the reverse order (or any mixed ordering) makes the search results way too noisy (at least with fuzzy search), because now suddenly it’s matching a ton more things.
There might be other ways to add the reverse order though, like non-fuzzy
could consider that later”

But I wonder how problematic this additional noise would actually be? If results are too noisy, it just requires a bit more specificity, right? Of course I can’t test this, so perhaps it would indeed be unruly… but the problem exists that these searches require memorising the term order – While I think that “Blender Intro” really should find results for “Introduction to Blender”.

#4

Current workaround (but nothing more) is to generate few permutations stored as aliases in YAML header. But that is feasible only for very small number of files or could be done programmatically.

This feature request would also help to solve Improvement to link suggestions - allow narrowing to folder while searching by allowing to filter the folder without need relocate caret the beginning of the search string.

1 Like