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Searching Your Outlines#

Every outline at once — plain text or regular expressions.

Editing works on one outline at a time. Search is how you ask a question of the whole folder: every .bike and .biked file you have pointed FoldNotes at, read the way you read them.

What it matches#

FoldNotes searches the visible outline text — the words you would see on screen — not the raw file. A .bike is HTML underneath, so a naive search would return hits inside tag names and attribute values; this one doesn't. Row text is what matches, and row text is what you get back.

Every result says which outline it came from and where that outline lives, and clicking it opens the file in place. Nothing is imported, copied, or converted.

Plain text or regex#

The search field takes ordinary words, or a regular expression — on macOS and iPad, the * toggle beside the field switches between the two.

  • A pattern you expect to reuse can be saved to a library by name, from the bookmark button. Saved patterns sync across your devices, so a regex written on the Mac is waiting on the iPad.
  • Regex search is read-only — there is no find-and-replace, deliberately. It finds every match and you edit each one by hand, with undo intact.

The note-only qualifiers (tag:, has:, is:) don't apply to outlines and drop out of the field when you are searching them.

iPhone keeps it simple

The regex toggle and the saved-pattern library are on macOS and iPad. iPhone keeps the plain-text search — a soft keyboard is no place for a regular expression.

On macOS, opening search (⌘⇧F) in your default collection gives you a scope control — your Notes, your External files, or Both. It starts on External when you are already editing an outline. With more than one external folder registered, a second dropdown narrows it to one folder — just your Bike library, say — and defaults to the folder of the file you are in.

On iPhone and iPad (FoldNotes 1.2.0 and later), Search All Notes has the same scope switch: your notes, your Bike files, or both. On iOS your Bike folder is the external library.

A search layer over a folder you write in elsewhere

If you write your outlines in another app, one document at a time, this turns FoldNotes into full-text — and regex — search across the whole folder without changing how you work. Point it at the folder, search it, and go on writing wherever you like.

See also#

  • Search — the full search feature, including the qualifier syntax and the saved-pattern library
  • Editing Bike Outlines — opening and editing outlines in place
  • Bike Rows in a Table — when the question is about rows rather than words