I have a database consisting of 3400 PDF documents and especially when searching for phrases a search takes really a long time. Is there any way to stop such a search? ESC or ‘Apple-.’ did not work. Is it possible to add such a possibility in future versions?
Cheers,
Alexander
No, it’s not possible at the moment. We may add such a feature in future versions, though.
Best,
Eric.
On the topic of searching…
I often use the toolbar search field, with “Name/Phrase/No Case/In Selection” settings. Trouble is, when no results are returned there’s no feedback indicating the search has finished so I have to delay long enough to make sure it is. There are other contexts where empty search results feedback would be helpful. Might that somehow be added?
I’d often like to modify how “In Selection” searching behaves. When I have a group open and use toolbar search there’s never been a reason to search by “Name” with any selected non-group items – I always want to search for items within the group. Having to always double-check to make sure items are deselected before searching like that is tedious. In other words, the way “In Selection” works now sometimes doesn’t make sense in combination with other settings and certain selections. Could that be improved?
And last, the ability to have per-window toolbar search settings stick between sessions would be convenient. Limiting that to windows that reopen at startup is good enough, with search settings saved in Settings.plist at shutdown (I presume). That would make the initial settings more predictable at startup. Is that possible?
Those enhancements would improve DT’s search usability/efficiency, especially the first two. They can probably be generalized for other contexts; I just gave some common examples for myself.
Thanks!
Hello,
stopping ongoing searches is a problem for as well. My database is quite large, and sometimes I wish I had not started a certain search with hundreds of results. Therefore, I would support a request for such an option.
In addition, I wish DT would start searching after I hitted a “search”-button. It starts instantly when I type the first letter – which is a nice feature on one side, but since my database is too large, the beachball starts, I do not know which letters I already have typed and everything ends up in a mess.
So, setting the search field in the browser field to “start after hitting enter” or something like that would be great.
Maria
For now I suppose you’ll have to use a standard search window instead of toolbar search to get that functionality. Today I discovered it’s possible to open multiple search windows. Never a dull day using DEVONthink. 
An toolbar search option I’d like would be “start search after N characters”, and I’d set N to at least 3.
Minor display glitch:
The first 3/4 or so of the search settings text in the toolbar field is “blanked out” when moving into it if the field is too narrow to normally display all the settings text.
DT always displays a “No results found” sheet if you’ve started the search on your own (by pressing return).
O that is the reason why … I had problems months ago! Somehow I abandoned using the return key naturally–
There is another new user who complains about no results, in another thread, but it might be good to check that.
It seems an odd behaviour to me.
Best,
Maria