Hey guys,
this might be a beginners questions as I bought DevonThink just in December, but I am not able to produce consistent results while searching after tags.
For instance, I have several documents tagged with “Invoice”. If I type Invoice in the search bar it shows all the documents that contain the term Invoice or are tagged with it, as expected.
However, for some tags only some documents but not all are shown. An example is the tag “Korsika 2023”. If I search Korsika 2023 in the search bar it shows just some documents. Only in case I search for “Korsika 2023” or tag: Korsika 2023 it shows the full list. For me, this is a bit inconvenient as I often do not now for which meta data I search specifically (e.g., I do not know all my tags, I just want to find all documents related with a term).
Unfortunately, I am not able to find out the logic behind what documents are shown for what tags. Somehow it feels like tags are not really considered by the search, only the name and the content of the documents is.
Do I do something wrong here? I think I do not yet understand the search functionality.
Thank you in advance.
The role of spaces and other non-alphabetic characters in search has been discussed before here (and it’s probably explained in the manual, too). The forum search should reveal those threads.
Long story short: If you want to search for non-alphabetic characters, enclose the search term in quotes.
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Thanks for the reply. For non-alphabetic characters I get it, but the behavior is also existent for other tags like “Korsika Holiday”.
There’s a space in that tag. Or do you have problems finding that even though you enclose it in quotes?
If I enclose it in quotes it works. However, shouldnt DevonThink be able to find all documents even without the quotes? In my opinion it is quite inconvenient to always know the exact string I am searching for. In my understanding even if only one term (i.e. “Korsika” or “Holiday”) is found it should be displayed.
Background of my question is that by putting it in quotes I must be sure that this exact string can be found (e.g., because it is a tag). However, a document with the title “Korsika Hotel Holiday” would not be shown by this (assume it is not tagged). By that kind of searches information is lost which is in the database or is there a simple workaround without the excessive use of wildcards?
My assumption would be that the default search operator is OR.
Update: I just compared it with Evernote. Evernote shows the results as expected by me.
Let ne re-iterate: search the forum for this issue and check the documentation. Asks this has been discussed before, I can’t really add anything new to it.
While I understand that you have certain expectations or habits, it might be worth revisiting them. Maybe you can find ways to mark your documents that help you finding them easier.
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My assumption would be that the default search operator is OR.
You assumption is incorrect. The default is an AND search in DEVONthink.
Also, if you’re looking for tags specifically, use the tags: search prefix.
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