I am aware that search excludes items in trash; to me that makes sense. I was surprised, however, that even when I select “trash” as the scope for the search (e.g. * scope:trash), no records are found. To me that behaviour is inconsistent; I would have imagined that it would either be impossible to select trash as the scope for the search, or that selecting that scope would provide a search in that location. Or am I just missing something glaringly obvious?
I would suggest that trash should remain routinely excluded from search, but should be searched if it is specifically selected as the scope for that search.
(DT 3.8 on macOS “did you really release that” 12.0.1)
Well, if you type in the search, you can type pretty much everything, I guess. Their parse will probably only check keywords and operators for validity, not the search terms or operands themselves. So if you say scope: ThisDatabaseDoesNotExist, you’ll not get any results back, but no error either. Some for trash, I guess.
I wouldn’t, typically. I have a smart rule which moves expired items to trash. Initially I required confirmation before the rule acted, but having now watched it do its work for a while, it now acts fully autonomously. It adds a brief report to the log and the date of deletion to the record comment (which would aid me in diagnosing “how on earth did that get in here?” if it were every necessary). After the rule had run for the first time, I checked to see whether everything had worked as planned - by searching for the “expired” comment - and found none. My workaround is to add a symbol to the record name and to sort trash alphabetically. That way a quick glance shows me what was automatically moved to trash; and actually that is better than doing an occasional search.
So generally, searching trash would only be necessary if you “lost” a file (i.e. couldn’t find it where you thought it was, or with search) and you wanted to check to see you hadn’t accidentally trashed it. Not completely silly, but nothing anybody would be doing regularly, I guess. It was the inconsistency which bothered me most, really - imagine having 200 items in trash, you’ve lost a file, you know it contains the word “Criss”, search in trash, search turns up nothing, you shrug and get on with your life. But the record actually was there, it’s just search didn’t actually search…
I too was confused why I wasn’t able to search in trash.
Is there an update on this, whether it is now possible to search in trash?
My reason is: I’m missing a particular page of a set of bank statements and I think I may have trashed it by accident while removing duplicates. The file names were not specific to the bank, account etc. so I wanted to search in trash for some key words that would be on the pdf.
Yes, the DBs’s trash that I can select within Devonthink. Not the Mac Finder trash. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly on a Sunday. I wasn’t expecting that!
Thank you, I can see value in emptying the trash regularly and do try to do this.
Despite this, it is useful to be able to search whether something has accidentally ended up in trash.
Does this mean that there is no way to search within the Trash in DT?
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