Search

Noteside has three distinct search surfaces. They look similar but answer different questions.

Find files & content (⌘P)

The fuzzy finder (⌘P, :find, or <Space> f) is how you jump between notes. Type a few characters of a note's title or path and it ranks matches instantly, backed by Rust nucleo. It stays sub-millisecond at 10,000 notes and takes about a millisecond at 50,000. It also surfaces content matches, so it doubles as a quick "where did I write that?".

This is your everyday navigator, so reach for it first. Open it with an empty query and it shows your recents: notes you open often and recently rank first, with pinned notes on top, so your working set is always a ⌘P ↵ away. Typed queries get the same gentle nudge, and near-ties break toward the notes you actually use.

Search note contents (⌘⇧F)

Content search (⌘⇧F, :grep, or <Space> g) scans the text of every note and shows matching lines with a live preview pane. It supports three modes:

• Plain. Literal substring.
• Regex. Full regular expressions.
• Fuzzy. Loose, typo-tolerant matching.

Use this when you want to see the matching lines in context across the whole notebook, not just jump to a file.

Find in the current note (⌘F)

⌘F opens a find bar docked at the top of the note, scoped to the note you have open. Type to highlight every match; Enter and ⇧Enter (or the ‹ › buttons) step through them, and so do F3 and ⇧F3 from anywhere in the editor. The counter shows which match you're on out of how many.

Esc closes the bar but keeps the highlights lit, so F3 keeps cycling after the bar is gone, which is vim's hlsearch behavior. The ✕ button clears the highlights and closes.

There's one find engine behind all of it: vim's /, n / N, and * / # drive the same search, and :noh clears the highlights.