The New 'Property' Query Feature Seems Inefficient

First off, the new property feature is fantastic, kudos to the Obsidian Team.

There is something however that works worse than what I was able to do before.

Previously I was able to have a page that contained queries showing which pieces of writing I had yet to complete.

The frontmatter I used was:

---
tags: #not-finished
---

And running a query for that gave me a nice list of note titles with that tag.

image

Now I have moved my notes to use Properties, but when I run a query, it not only gives the note name, but automatically expands to show where the property I searched for is:

image

This new view using properties is much more cluttered. Is there a way I can get it to at least stop expanding the result? I thought querying for Properties would show only the applicable note titles?

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To show only file names, open the settings next to the search box and enable “Collapse results”.

Also I think you have a typo in your post —# marks comments in YAML (the language used by properties), so those queries shouldn’t work. The tag would need to be in quotation marks or not have the #.

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Hi, this isnt a search box use case, but an embedded query use case.

It seems like Obsidian doesnt view the properties of a file as ‘properties’, but rather just extra text to search.

Secondly, using the # has always worked for me and it has never worked without. Is this a bug?

Ah, embedded searches unfortunately don’t have a way to control collapse or expand the previews. There is a beta plugin (not in the plugin store) called Query Control that gives embedded searches all of the features of sidebar searches. GitHub - nothingislost/obsidian-query-control: An experimental Obsidian plugin that adds controls to embedded queries

The value tags: #not-finished should work with a plain-text search of #not-finished but not with the search operator tag: not-finished.

The values tags: not-finished or tags: "#not-finished" should work with the search operator tag: not-finished.

If you experience something different, that is surprising.

I tested all 3 examples in my vault and got the expected results:

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