Workspace

Search

Full-text search is the blunt instrument of a note vault, and a good one: type a few words, land on the line where you wrote them. Clew's search reads the files themselves at query time, so results cannot go stale, and composes plain terms with a small, sharp set of operators for phrases, paths, file names, and tags. This chapter covers the search panel, every operator the engine supports, find within a single note, and the boundary where search hands over to queries.

Opening search

Press ⌘⇧F (Search in all files, also under Edit → Search in All Files). The left sidebar opens on its Search tool with the input focused; results appear as you type, after a brief pause. There is no search button and no need for one — refine the text and the results follow.

Reading the results

Results are grouped by note, with a count of matching notes at the top. Each group shows the note's name — click it to open the note — followed by one snippet per matching line, with the matched text highlighted. Clicking a snippet opens the note in source mode at that line, cursor placed, so a search is never more than two clicks from the exact sentence you were hunting.

Two ceilings keep giant vaults responsive: search stops after 200 matching notes, and shows at most 20 matching lines per note. If you hit either, the query is too broad to be useful anyway — add a term or an operator.

The query language

A query is a sequence of terms and operators separated by spaces. Everything is case-insensitive, and every part must match — the parts are AND-ed together, so each additional term narrows the results. This is the complete operator set:

Plain terms

A bare word matches notes containing it anywhere in their text, as a substring. Several words may match in entirely different parts of the note — they are independent conditions, not a phrase.

replicator dynamics

finds notes containing both replicator and dynamics, whether or not they are adjacent. Because matching is by substring, graph also matches photograph — quote a phrase or add terms when that bites.

"Quoted phrases"

Double quotes turn several words into one condition: the exact sequence, spaces and all, still case-insensitive.

"evolutionarily stable strategy"

matches only notes containing that exact phrase.

path:

path: keeps only notes whose vault path contains the given text — folders and file name both count, so it is the operator for scoping a search to a corner of the vault.

deadline path:Projects

finds deadline only in notes under a path containing Projects — Projects/Clew/Notes.md and Old Projects/Archive.md alike, since the test is a substring of the whole path.

file:

file: is the same idea applied to the file name alone, ignoring the folders above it.

file:meeting agenda

finds notes whose file name contains meeting and whose text contains agenda.

tag:

tag: keeps only notes carrying the given tag — from an inline #tag or the frontmatter tags property. The # is optional: tag:#draft and tag:draft are the same query. Nested tags match their parents, so tag:project also finds notes tagged #project/clew.

theorem tag:#demo path:Features

finds notes mentioning theorem, tagged #demo, under a path containing Features — the demo vault's engine stress-tests, as it happens.

Filters without terms

A query of nothing but filters is legal and useful: with no text terms to match, every note passing the filters is listed, without snippets. tag:#guide lists every guide note; path:Essays file:2026 lists this year's essays. The search panel doubles as a quick file lister this way.

Find in a note

Within a single note, ⌘F (Find in note, also Edit → Find in Note) opens the editor's own search panel across the top of the pane — the standard CodeMirror find-and- replace, with next/previous, replace, and match options. Press Enter in its field for the next match and ⇧Enter for the previous; Esc closes it. This is an editor feature, so it is available in source mode.

Search and symlinked folders

Clew supports symbolic links inside vaults, and search honours them: anything the vault index can see — including notes reached through a symlinked folder that physically lives elsewhere on disk — is searched like any other note, with cycle-safe walking so a loop of links cannot trap the scan. See Vaults and files for how symlinks behave generally.

Search or a query?

Search and queries overlap just enough to prompt the question. The rule of thumb: search is for a moment, queries are for a view.

• Reach for search when you are hunting something once — a phrase you remember writing, the note where a name came up, every file mentioning a citation key. Ask, click, done.
• Reach for a query when the question deserves to live in a note and stay answered: a table of every note tagged #paper with its status field, a task list gathered from a project folder, a kanban board. Query results update on every vault change — and unlike search results, they are editable in place.

Reference

Hotkeys are macOS notation; on Windows and Linux read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt.

See also

• Queries — persistent, editable views over the vault's structured data.
• Panels — the search panel's home, and the unlinked-mentions scanner.
• Properties and metadata — the tags and frontmatter that tag: reads.
• Vaults and files — symlinks and what counts as part of the vault.