Smart Group: Markdown files with incomplete todo's

DEVONthink Scenarios
#1

Good afternoon,

I’ve been trying to create a smart group which will find all markdown files with incomplete todo’s in them. I use Obsidian for daily notes as well as general knowledge management but I find I miss todo’s from previous days too often.

I tried creating a Smart Group which indexes the Obsidian vault with the following search and it never returns any results:
All - Content contains “- [ ]”

When I try the following search it works but this is the opposite of what I want (Completed todo’s):
All - Content contains “- [x]”

How can I force the search to look for a space between two square brackets?

Thanks,
Dave

#2

Non-alphanumeric characters, except a very small handful of exceptions, are not indexed so you can’t search for [].

#3

Hmm - thanks. I appreciate the quick response - at least I wasn’t imagining things.

Kind of sad given how prevalent markdown is these days.I guess I’ll have to try my hand a writing an Obsidian plugin.

#4

You could use one of the additionally indexed characters inside your “undone” tasks, then search for e.g.

"- [¥]"

Here are all additionally indexed characters:

$€£¥%§

#5

Thanks - I’ll see how Obsidian treats these characters - this could be a good solution.

#6

I was able to try this solution in Obsidian today with no luck. Seems like Obsidian loses the ability to ‘check’ the checkbox if unknown characters are between the brackets - I think the todo syntax is pretty standard for markdown documents so not too surprised.

Thanks for the idea though,
Dave

#7

There is no standard as there is more than one flavor of Markdown and some apps implement their own version.

Neither Gruber’s original spec nor MultiMarkdown (which we use) supports a todo syntax.

#8

Thanks, I was a bit confused by

as I haven’t seen rendered checkboxes in a long time (only use MultiMarkdown).

#9

No problem.

#10

Fair enough about it not being in the original Markdown standard - I guess I should have been more specific regarding what I was looking at (Extended Syntax from markdownguide). I guess we’ll just agree that DEVONThink won’t be the solution to my problem - I’ll figure it out within Obsidian.

Dave