This issue has been raised before, but I see no moving on that front and it worries me.There are wild inconsistencies between:
Search all notes
The quick switcher
Wikilinks autocompletion
Some words and notes are found in some ways to search, not in the others, and it’s quite frustrating. The Quick switcher is especially bad at this – it consistently fails to find some words, yet will find combinations of the letters in other words! Finding your stuff is pretty important, especially with an app that aims to be as polished as Bear.
Search is a crucial feature in Bear, so I’d like to clarify the different search interfaces we offer.
We have several types of search functions—Search, Quick Open, and Autocompletion—each designed to serve a specific purpose, which is why they operate differently by design.
The General search is the most comprehensive, handling multiple tasks such as searching through titles, text, tags, and special searches. We’re currently pleased with its performance and have plans to enhance it further, particularly in conjunction with some new features .
Wikilinks autocompletion specifically searches note titles and only matches sequentially based on what you’ve typed within [[. It’s designed to be fast and predictable.
Quick Open is intended for swiftly switching between notes, using a fuzzy search that lets you type just a few letters to filter titles. While fuzzy search is a powerful tool with various functionalities, it still behaves like autocompletion when you enter a title sequentially.
Although Wikilinks autocompletion and Quick Open could be adjusted to behave more “unified,” they are designed to fulfill distinct roles.
If you’re encountering an issue with Quick Open where the result weighting seems off, that’s likely a bug. If you share the specific result and your expected outcome with me, I can look into resolving it.
Please let me know if this explanation meets your needs.
Thank very much for taking the time to clarify all that. I should have mentioned in my original post that I am indeed actually looking for notes titles (I am indeed not expecting to see notes’ contents to appear in WikiLinks auto completion nor the Quick Open).
I am indeed not finding words in notes titles via Quick open, and WikiLinks autocompletion fails to pick up some of them as well (there’s a relatively old, separate thread about this).
The word I’m expecting to find via Quick Open is in parentheses. With (foo I should find it if I start typing fo but it is not the case on my end. (fo does not pick it up either.
I don’t know for sure if this will help your particular case, but I’ve had problems (and still do) searching note titles with punctuation - parentheses, apostrophes, etc. Usually, they are older notes (i.e., created a few years ago), but not always. It seems to be a problem with notes I’ve exported or imported in some way. Who knows? Anyway, I’ve been able to fix the search issue for titles by completely deleting the full title heading of the note and retyping it entirely.
Hm. I have a similar experience with some imported notes indeed. However, having to find and retype about 6k notes imported from Obsidian is clearly not feasible
I also found a comparable experience when creating notes from wikilinks. @trix180 , both causes might be the culprits!
I have had this issue for quite a while. There are a few notes that are never suggested when I try to link to them. The notes that don’t appear seem to be single word note titles that are used in a lot of other multiple word titles. For example I have a note titled “leadership”. I also have a lot of other notes which have “leadership” in the title like “2024-06 leadership meeting”. The “leadership” note never shows up in the wikilinks autocomplete suggestions. However, It shows all the other notes that have “leadership” as part of the title.
I’m not convinced it’s a scoring issue. All imported notes with punctuation in the titles aren’t indexed upon import for some reason.
As a side note, this reminds me of Noteplan. I tried that app years ago. Search couldn’t find anything with punctuation in the title (among other things). It turns out they were using the fuse.js library for fuzzy search which, well, can’t handle much.
With Bear, I thought this issue was being worked until I saw above that you were happy with general search. It’s been this way for a long while. This is just a suggestion but I’d display a small note to the user about this during the import process. It’s kinda of a big deal when you can’t search your notes normally.
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